Six passes turn a set of independently published documents into a single record of what the group has said, where it agrees with itself, and where it does not yet.
A reconciliation engagement covers every document a division makes public within the period under instruction. In practice this means:
Internal correspondence is out of scope unless a division elects to bring it in at onboarding. Divisions that have been through a Pass Five routing decision once tend to bring it in on the second engagement.
The method runs in six passes. Each pass produces an output that becomes the input to the next, and the sixth pass is not optional, whatever the timetable pressure at delivery.
Every document issued in the period is logged against its publishing division, its date, and its intended audience. A document with no identifiable intended audience is logged and flagged, because audience determines which other documents it will later be checked against; a document without one cannot proceed past this pass.
Each document is broken into discrete factual claims, and each claim receives a reference number. A claim is any statement that could, in principle, be checked against a record: a figure, a date, a named outcome, a description of a mechanism. Statements of opinion, aspiration or intent are logged separately and are not carried forward, because they cannot conflict with a fact in the way this method is built to detect.
Each claim is checked against every other claim in the current register that references the same underlying fact, event or population, regardless of which division published it or when. This is the pass that finds the cases a single division’s own review would miss. No division reviews its own output against a competitor division’s output as a matter of course, and reconciliation exists for the cases that fall in the gap between two divisions’ individual sign-off processes, a gap that widens in proportion to how many divisions are publishing under one name.
Every claim that survives cross-referencing is graded against the strength of its locatable source inside the group’s own record.
| Tier | Basis | Treatment |
|---|---|---|
| A | Traceable to a primary group record: an audited figure, a signed filing, a dated transcript | Cleared, no further action |
| B | Traceable to a division’s own internal working file, not independently audited | Cleared, logged for periodic re-test |
| C | Traceable to a prior public statement by the group, not to an underlying record | Held pending a source request to the originating division |
| D | Attributed to a named third party, an expert, a study, a survey, not independently verified by this firm | Routed to Source Credibility Review before clearance |
| E | Untraceable within a working day of request | Held; the document is scheduled around the claim rather than delayed for it |
Roughly six in ten claims clear at Tier A or B on first pass. The remainder is where the caseload lives, and where the next two passes do their work.
Where two claims conflict, one is amended to match the other. The routing rule is fixed and is stated to every client at onboarding, because it is the one part of the method clients otherwise assume works the other way round. The claim in the more recently published document is presumptively the one amended, on the reasoning that the older claim was cleared first and the newer claim is the one that introduced the conflict. Where both documents are equally recent, the claim reaching the more scrutinised audience, ordinarily an investor or regulatory audience, is the one left standing, and the other is amended toward it.
Neither rule determines which claim was more accurate to begin with, and the method does not attempt to. That determination sits outside the engagement, for the reasons given under Designation.
A finding closes when the conflicting claims no longer conflict. It is re-tested at the next reconciliation cycle to confirm the amendment held. A finding that reopens because the amended document reverted, whether by a later edit or a template default, is logged as a new finding against the reversion rather than as a reopening of the old one. This distinction matters to a client’s findings count more than it sounds like it should, and clients who ask why are shown the finding log rather than told.
What the sixth pass does not do. Re-testing confirms the two documents still agree with each other. It does not re-test whether the agreed position is the one either document held before the finding was raised. A closed finding is a closed finding.</div>
A Pre-Publication Reconciliation pass on a single document completes within three working days of receipt. A Standing Retainer client’s weekly cycle covers everything published since the prior cycle and closes within the same five working days it opens. A Full-Group Attestation, covering every division under instruction for a full reporting year, is scoped at kickoff and takes six to nine weeks depending on how many divisions are being brought into scope for the first time. A division already under a Standing Retainer contributes a closed register rather than a fresh one at attestation time, which is most of why the retainer exists. Terms and current fees are set out under Engagement.