Editorial standards and corrections

Charterbend has one method and it fits in a sentence: a statement about a named institution is published only when a filed public document is named beside it. Everything on this page is the working out of that sentence — what counts as a document, what happens when the document turns out to say something else, and how often the whole site is read again.

How a claim reaches a page

Nothing is written from memory, from a press summary, or from another publication. The order is always the same.

1. The document is opened at its own address — a filing, a public register, a statute, or an agency rule — and saved locally with the date it was downloaded.
2. A row goes into the dossier for that piece. The row carries four things: the claim in one sentence, the literal excerpt from the document that supports it, the address the document was read at, and the date it was checked.
3. A second reader opens every row again by its own link, and is asked to be difficult about it. A row that cannot be reproduced is struck, not softened.
4. The sentence is then written on the page with the document hanging under it, as a monospaced stamp carrying the form, the date, the identifier, and the link. Every document that appears in any stamp also appears in the source register.
5. A claim with no row does not get published. There is no category of statement that is obvious enough to skip the row.

Three kinds of sentence are ruled out before they are written. Judgements about the motives, competence, solvency, good faith, or law-abidingness of an institution, beyond what the document itself states. Predictions of the form “this will lead to.” Rankings and evaluative comparisons between named institutions. Each dossier also carries its own list of things that must not be claimed from the documents it holds, and that list is written before the piece is.

There are no interviews and no unnamed sources. Material offered in confidence is not published and is not used.

Corrections

A request for a correction goes to corrections@charterbend.digital. It is logged the day it arrives and answered the same day, whether or not the answer is yet known; where the request is right, the page is fixed and the log entry carries both the old text and the new one.

A published statement is never changed quietly. A correction that alters what the site says about a named institution is always logged, with its date, the page, the previous text, and the replacement. A fix that changes no meaning — a typographical slip, a broken link repointed at the same document — is made without a log entry, and the verification date in the band at the top of the page is the record that the page was touched.

The log is also the reason the dossiers are kept rather than discarded. A document can move or disappear after publication, and what matters afterwards is what it said on the date it was read.

The corrections log

Charterbend first published in 2026. An empty log on a site with a long archive would be a warning sign; on a site this young it is a statement of fact.

Re-verification

Facts about a living company divide into two kinds. Some do not spoil: a founding date, a former name, a certificate number, the date a document was filed, the text of the document itself. Others spoil quickly: the supervisor, the charter class, a total of assets, a count of offices, the membership of a board, the status of a transaction. The second kind is printed with the date and the document it came from attached — “as of” a date, from a named filing — or it is not printed at all.

The band at the top of every page carries that page’s own verification date and the documents it rests on.

The date is not decoration. A page that names a real institution and carries a verification date a year old, with no sweep behind it, is a liability rather than an asset, and this publication treats it that way. The clearest illustration came out of its own drafting. An early note on the principal subject named a federal supervisor that a filed register change had already overtaken; the statement would have been eight months stale on the day it was typed, and it was caught only because a second reader opened the register again instead of trusting the note.

Why there are no reviews here

Charterbend publishes no user reviews, no ratings and no testimonials, and it never will. Inventing them would break the Federal Trade Commission’s rule on consumer reviews, and quoting real ones we cannot verify would be no better.

The rule is 16 CFR Part 465, in force since October 21, 2024 and published as the final rule at 89 FR 68034. Section 465.2 forbids writing, creating, and selling a fake review or consumer testimonial — one whose author does not exist, did not have the experience described, or misrepresents it. Later sections reach the purchase of positive or negative reviews, insider reviews, company-controlled “independent review” sites, review suppression, and fake indicators of social-media influence. The civil penalty for a rule violation currently runs to $53,088 per violation.

Whether Part 465 binds this publication at all is arguable, and the argument does not matter here. The rule addresses a “business” — a person selling goods or services — and Charterbend sells nothing. An invented review about a named company would still be a deceptive act and would still be disparagement under state law, so the prohibition on this site is absolute rather than conditional. It covers the visible page and the structured data alike: there is no Review, no AggregateRating, and no star anywhere in the markup of this site.

What stands in place of a rating is the source register: every document cited anywhere on the site, in one table, with its identifier and its address, so that any sentence here can be read against the paper it came from.