Accuracy record

This exists because provenance is the product. Anyone can publish a number. The claim worth making is that a number was read from the instrument that creates it, on a date, and is re-checked — and that claim is only worth anything if we also publish what we got wrong.

Findings come from reading primary sources, not from comparing one aggregator against another. Where a discrepancy could not be reproduced from a public document, it is not listed. We name instruments, not vendors.

Malta — 5% is not the corporate tax rate

Commonly published: That Malta's effective corporate tax rate is 5%, often stated flatly as though it were the rate a company pays.

What the source actually says: The statutory rate is 35% and it is genuinely paid by the company. Under full imputation, shareholders receiving distributions from specified tax accounts may then claim a REFUND — commonly six-sevenths on active trading income, giving a 5% net outcome, or five-sevenths on passive interest and royalties, giving 10%. Those are shareholder-level outcomes claimed after distribution, not the corporate rate. A payroll or provisioning calculation using 5% as the company's rate is wrong by 30 points.

Instrument: Income Tax Act, Cap. 123, read with the Income Tax Management Act

Check it yourself: Look for who claims the refund. If it is the shareholder and only after a distribution, it is not the company's tax rate.

Slovenia — the '7% minimum effective corporate rate' is out of date

Commonly published: That Slovenia has a minimum effective corporate tax rate of about 7%.

What the source actually says: The rule is a 63% cap on aggregate reductions of the tax base (ZDDPO-2 Art 59.a), leaving a minimum taxable base of 37%. 7.03% was 19% × 37% — correct only while the headline rate was 19%. The rate has been 22% since 2024, so the figure is 8.14%. Separately, the 22% is not in ZDDPO-2 at all: Art 60 still reads 19%, and the 22% is an override in ZORZFS Art 64 enumerated for 2024–2028 only, reverting to 19% for tax year 2029.

Instrument: ZDDPO-2 Arts 59.a and 60; ZORZFS Art 64 (Uradni list RS 131/2023)

Check it yourself: Multiply the current headline rate by 37%. If a published 'minimum effective rate' does not move when the headline rate moves, it is stale.

Cyprus — the late-payment law is N. 123(I)/2012, not 73(I)/2012

Commonly published: That Cyprus transposed the Late Payment Directive by Law 73(I)/2012.

What the source actually says: 73(I)/2003 was the repealed predecessor, transposing the earlier Directive 2000/35/EC. The instrument in force is N. 123(I)/2012 as amended by N. 227(I)/2022. Citing the repealed law points a reader at superseded payment terms.

Instrument: Ν. 123(Ι)/2012 as amended by Ν. 227(Ι)/2022

Check it yourself: Check which Directive the cited law transposes. 2000/35/EC means you have the repealed one.

Slovenia — payment terms are not '30 days by default, 60 by agreement'

Commonly published: That Slovenian B2B payment terms default to 30 days and may be extended to 60 by agreement.

What the source actually says: Three distinct rules are being collapsed into one. The B2B cap is 60 days by ordinary agreement (ZPreZP-1 Art 10(1)); beyond 60 days requires writing and must not be grossly unfair (Art 10(2)); 30 days is the gap-filler when nothing was agreed (Art 12), and separately the cap where the debtor is a public authority (Art 11(1)).

Instrument: Zakon o preprečevanju zamud pri plačilih (ZPreZP-1), Uradni list RS 57/2012

Check it yourself: Read Arts 10, 11 and 12 together. They answer three different questions.

Luxembourg — 3% is the broad rate, 8% is the narrow one

Commonly published: An assumption, carried over from how most member states are structured, that the higher reduced rate covers the essentials basket.

What the source actually says: Luxembourg inverts the usual pattern. The 3% super-reduced rate carries food, non-alcoholic drinks, books, pharmaceuticals, hotels, restaurants and passenger transport. The 8% rate is narrow: hairdressing, gas and electricity, bicycle and shoe repair, cleaning. Applying 8% to food would overcharge by five points.

Instrument: Loi modifiée du 12 février 1979 concernant la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée

Check it yourself: Look up which annex food sits in, rather than assuming the higher reduced rate is the general one.

Thirteen tax series wore the current code year as their effective date

What was wrong: Several francophone African countries re-enact their entire tax code or annexe fiscale every January. Thirteen of our VAT, corporate-tax and income-tax series (Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Gabon, Congo, DR Congo, and Mali's 2011 guess) stamped effective_from with the CURRENT re-enactment — an unchanged 18% VAT dated 2026-01-01 — which reads as a rate change that never happened. An outside audit called it 'effective-date inflation' and it was our most systemic metadata fault, the same class of error as the Indonesia correction below: dating the value to the instrument rather than to the rate. The fix ran gazette-level research on every affected series, each finding adversarially re-verified. Eleven series now carry their researched origin — among them Côte d'Ivoire VAT 18% from the annexe fiscale 2003 (per the DGI's own amendment annotations), Côte d'Ivoire corporate 25% from the annexe fiscale 2008 (Journal Officiel facsimile read in full, refuting the widely-believed '2021 cut from 30%' — 30% was never the general rate), Niger VAT 19% from a mid-2000 rectification law, Niger's 30%/ITS pair from the loi de finances 2010 gazette, Gabon corporate 30% from the loi de finances 2013, Congo VAT 18% from the 1997 law that instituted the tax (signed original read on the SGG's own host), and DR Congo's 30% and IRPP barème from the 2018/2019 finance laws that actually set them. Where the origin is corroborated but the gazette text is unobtainable (Gabon VAT's 1995 institution, Mozambique's IRPS schedule, Congo corporate), the value now carries a machine-readable `effective_from_basis: "restatement"` instead — the date is a verified floor, not a change — because silently keeping the misleading stamp and silently guessing an older date are both wrong. One suspect survived scrutiny intact: Congo's 2026 income-tax date is genuine (the finance law really did rewrite the barème).

Instrument: Per-series gazette research, each cited in the series' own source and notes; the flag is documented at /docs and in the OpenAPI schema

Check it yourself: GET /v1/ci/vat — effective_from 2003-07-07 with the 2001 20% window in history. GET /v1/ga/vat — effective_from_basis 'restatement' with the researched origin stated in notes. Diff the /changes feed: restatement rows are marked so a feed consumer cannot mistake a re-enactment for a change.

Nine citations pointed at something other than the instrument

What was wrong: Provenance is what this product sells, and an outside audit found a minority of citations that did not carry their value: a URA sector page cited for Uganda's VAT rate while naming an Order whose text it is not; Mozambique's income-tax schedule pinned to Artigo 54-A — the capital-gains regime added in 2025, whose ladder is deceptively identical in shape to the general Artigo 54 schedule; Côte d'Ivoire's minimum wage cited to a private legal blog, with an agricultural SMAG figure attributed to a decree that (read article-by-article) contains no SMAG at all — that figure is now WITHDRAWN rather than re-homed, because no instrument for it could be identified; Nigeria's minimum wage cited to the State House press release rather than any legal text; Algeria's policy rate cited to the central bank's statistics table rather than the Instruction that sets it; Angola's policy rate cited to an SPA route that serves nothing to a non-browser client; DR Congo's SMIG cited to a news article. Each is now re-pointed at the best verifiable instrument — including Algeria's Instruction n°02-2026 fetched from the Bank's own host, Uganda's operative 2006 Order on ULII, and the DRC Journal Officiel scan that also disproved the audit's own claim that we cited the wrong law number (the JO shows 23/053 is the IS/IRPP reform; 23/052 is procedures). Where no official host serves the text (Nigeria's gazetted Act, Côte d'Ivoire's paywalled JO, DRC's decree), the citation now says exactly what it is and is not, in two labelled parts. One non-error worth recording: BEAC serves its CURRENT rate decision from a reused 2016-dated URL slot that is overwritten at each session — the citation was right all along, and the mechanics are now documented so a changed hash reads as a new decision, not a broken link.

Instrument: Each corrected citation names its instrument in the series' source field; access mechanics (bot-blocks, rotating slots, paywalled gazettes) are disclosed in notes

Check it yourself: GET /v1/dz/policy-rate — the source is the Banque d'Algérie Instruction PDF, not a statistics page. GET /v1/ci/minimum-wage — no SMAG is served, and the notes say why. GET /v1/ug/vat — the source URL is the Order's text.

Euro area — we served the wrong ECB rate for twelve of twenty years

What was wrong: Every euro-area policy-rate series describes itself as the ECB DEPOSIT FACILITY RATE, and its notes say so twice over: 'the ECB steers the stance through the DEPOSIT FACILITY RATE, which is the rate served here'. Twelve of each series' twenty rows carried the MAIN REFINANCING rate instead — 216 rows across 18 countries. The gap is 40 to 50 basis points and it reached callers: a point-in-time query for 1 January 2023 returned 3.0% labelled as the deposit facility rate, when the deposit facility rate was 2.0%; for June 2018 it returned 0.0% when the rate was -0.40%. Anyone pricing off 'the ECB policy rate' for a 2023 date was 100bp out. The MRO is not a defensible substitute here even though it WAS the headline policy rate before the ECB's 2024 framework review, because this service already publishes the MRO separately and correctly as `ecb-main-refinancing-rate` in all twenty of these countries — so the MRO rows inside policy-rate duplicated a series we already served while contradicting policy-rate's own definition. The history has been rebuilt from the ECB Data Portal series FM.D.U2.EUR.4F.KR.DFR.LEV rather than patched, because the two rates do not move on identical dates: the deposit facility rate changed on 18 September 2019 when the main refinancing rate did not, so the old history was missing a change point altogether. Coverage now runs from each country's euro adoption date instead of an arbitrary 2018 floor, and every row is cited to the ECB and marked primary, replacing citations to the BIS compilation.

Instrument: ECB Data Portal series FM.D.U2.EUR.4F.KR.DFR.LEV (key ECB interest rates, deposit facility)

Check it yourself: Ask any euro-area country for its policy rate as at 2023-01-01. It should answer 2.0%, not 3.0%. Ask as at 2019-11-01 and it should answer -0.5%. Ask Croatia as at 2010 and it should REFUSE — Croatia adopted the euro on 2023-01-01 and the ECB rate was not its policy rate before that.

Germany — we refused five and a half years of VAT we could have answered

What was wrong: Asked for the German standard VAT rate as at any date from 1 January 2021 onward, we refused, stating that the most recent value we held 'lapsed on 2020-12-31' and that we held 'no successor covering that date'. We held the successor: 19%, in force since 1 January 2007 and never repealed. Germany cut the standard rate to 16% for six months in 2020 (Zweites Corona-Steuerhilfegesetz, BGBl. I 2020 S. 1512) and 19% resumed automatically on 1 January 2021. Our point-in-time resolver picked the row with the latest START date rather than the row actually IN FORCE, so once the temporary cut expired it kept winning and the open-ended rate it had interrupted was never reconsidered. Two things make this worse than a gap: the refusal asserted something false with specifics attached, and it is the second false refusal we have published (after Indonesia), from a different cause — there the date was wrong, here the date was right and the resolver was wrong. The resolver now selects on the interval a value covers rather than on when it began, and a data-contract checker flags any series whose history overlaps its current value so the shape is caught rather than the symptom.

Instrument: Umsatzsteuergesetz § 12(1); Zweites Corona-Steuerhilfegesetz of 29 June 2020 (BGBl. I 2020 S. 1512)

Check it yourself: Ask for Germany's VAT rate as at any date in 2021 or later. It should answer 19%. Ask as at September 2020 and it should answer 16% and tell you it was superseded on 2021-01-01.

Ninety-nine historical values we serve without a citation

What was wrong: Point-in-time reads (?as_at=) can return a historical value that carries no source of its own. 99 of the 2,633 historical rows we hold are like this, across 32 series in 12 countries — among them GB VAT before 2011, Canadian CPI, Indian and Italian policy rates, and Korean and Philippine wage history. Until 2026-08-03 the `source` field was simply ABSENT from those responses, which meant a paid answer quietly dropped the one thing this service sells, and a caller could only notice by comparing keys against another response. They now carry `source: null` and a `provenance_gap` message naming the limitation. We chose to keep serving them rather than withhold them: each is dated and we believe each correct, and removing real coverage over a metadata gap would help nobody. But they do not carry the evidence the rest of the dataset does, and you should not treat them as if they do. Separately, historical rows generally do not carry a `confidence` level; we deliberately do NOT inherit the current value's, because that would assert a verification standard nobody applied to the older figure.

Instrument: (none — that is the finding)

Check it yourself: Request GET /v1/gb/vat?as_at=2010-06-01. The response carries source: null and a provenance_gap message. Compare against GET /v1/gb/vat, which is fully cited.

We returned HTTP 500 on two countries for part of a day

What was wrong: A guard added to stop working-days selling wrong answers past our calendar coverage did not account for holiday entries with a deliberately null date (ungazetted placeholders). Sorting put null last and the coverage computation threw. Trinidad and Guyana returned 500 until it was fixed. The guard itself was correct and necessary; the null-handling was not.

Instrument: (internal — commit 8087e21 through d4dc14b)

Check it yourself: POST /v1/answers/working-days for tt or gy. It now refuses or answers, never 500s.