Financial Content Fact-Check Worksheet

Fact-checking is a practice, not a document. The worksheet is what the practice looks like when it is repeatable.

Financial articles cite numbers. Contribution limits, tax brackets, mileage rates, wage bases, deduction thresholds, actuarial factors. Each number ages on its own schedule. Articles that fact-check numbers at publish time and revisit them on a maintenance calendar stay accurate; articles that check once and forget quietly drift into wrong. This worksheet is the pre-publish check, structured to leave a paper trail the editorial team can revisit later.

One row per number

The worksheet has one row for each specific number cited in the article. Not one row per topic; one row per number. An article that cites the IRA contribution limit, the Roth phase-out, and the standard deduction has three rows. Sixty-second-per-row work; five to ten minutes for a typical article; hours saved every time the article is challenged, updated, or migrated later.

How to fill each row

The number cited column captures the value as it will appear in the finished article, with the surrounding context in enough detail that a later reader can find the specific claim. The constant name column captures the underlying constant, if the value is a named constant rather than a computed number. The source column captures the primary-source document; not a secondary reference, not a summary, not a wiki. The source URL is the direct link, which should resolve today; if it does not, the row is not complete.

The period column captures which tax year or time period the value applies to. This is important because articles that cite tax-year-sensitive values without naming the year are the articles that age worst; a reader arriving a year later has no way to know whether the value was current at publish time. The revision date is the day the row was verified; it belongs on the worksheet even if the article does not display it. The spec or facts-row identifier column applies when the article integrates a calculator or references a maintained registry row; this is what makes the row updatable rather than static.

The reviewer column captures accountability. The notes column captures anything the row would otherwise leave out. A pending revenue procedure, a partial-year adjustment, a state-level variation — the notes column is where the row is honest about the parts that do not fit the other columns.

The pre-publish check

• ✓Every specific number in the article appears in exactly one row of the worksheet.
• ✓Every source URL resolves and displays the value the article cites.
• ✓Every period is named explicitly (TY2026, current SSA table, and so on), not implied.
• ✓Every revision date is within the current maintenance window.
• ✓Any pending updates (a Rev. Proc. expected in the next two months) are noted, with a follow-up date.

The post-publish maintenance

The worksheet is a durable artifact, not a one-time exercise. Each year during the tax-year rollover window, the editorial team walks the worksheet for each maintained article, updates the values that moved, updates the revision dates, and refreshes the article accordingly. Articles that are re-verified this way each year stay accurate indefinitely. Articles that are checked at publish time and never again drift on the schedule the sources set, not the schedule the publication set.

Fact-checking that is not about constants

The worksheet is scoped to the specific numbers in an article. Other kinds of fact-checking — statements about how a regulation works, quotations attributed to a source, historical claims — belong to the broader editorial process and are not what this worksheet is for. A number is either right or wrong today, and the worksheet is what confirms which. Narrative claims are legitimately more nuanced and require a different discipline.

The relationship to the tax-year rollover checklist

The tax-year rollover checklist covers site-level constants. The fact-check worksheet covers article-level values. The two overlap where an article cites a constant that is also on the site-level inventory. Editorial teams that maintain both artifacts together find that the worksheet feeds the rollover inventory automatically — articles cite constants, constants roll over, articles get revisited during the window. The maintenance discipline is smaller when the two artifacts are integrated than when they are maintained separately.

“A number in an article is a claim with a date. The worksheet is what makes the date visible.”

The scale question

A publication with a dozen articles can maintain the worksheets manually. A publication with hundreds finds that manual maintenance becomes a full-time job. At scale, the worksheet’s columns become fields in a content-management system, the spec-or-facts-row identifier links each article to a maintained registry, and the annual re-verification becomes a database query rather than a manual walk. The discipline scales; the mechanics change. What does not change is that every number in every article is either sourced, dated, and updatable, or it is drifting.

The worksheet in an AI-assisted editorial workflow

Editorial teams increasingly use language-model assistance to draft articles. The worksheet applies unchanged to AI-assisted drafts and is more important, not less. A language-model draft that cites a number typically produces the value with confident cadence and no source; the fact-check step is what turns the draft into a publishable article. Teams that run the worksheet against every AI-drafted article catch the specific class of hallucination — confident, plausible, wrong — that the draft process produces. The alternative is publishing a draft whose numbers were verified by the same process that could not compute them in the first place.

The worksheet across an archive

Publications with substantial archives find that the worksheet applies retroactively to old articles too. An article from three years ago whose numbers were correct at publish time but were never re-verified is a candidate for either an update, a period-lock, or a retraction. The worksheet is the mechanism that surfaces which category each old article falls into; without it, the archive is a set of articles whose accuracy is unknown, and unknown accuracy is a reputational risk that grows with the archive’s size.

Retroactive fact-checking is more work than pre-publish fact-checking. Publications that adopt the worksheet often start with a going-forward policy and add retroactive coverage over time. The going-forward discipline is what stops the archive from getting worse; the retroactive coverage is what makes it better. Both are worth doing; teams that treat them as sequenced rather than simultaneous produce a durable improvement in the accuracy of the whole publication.