Every number on this site was read out of a named document before it was written down, and that document was saved. Nothing published here rests on recollection.
When a source becomes citable
A claim is publishable once it has been read in the issuing body's own document: the statute, the deal paper, the budget line, the published evaluation, or the agency's own page. Press coverage and aggregators are used to locate documents and never to source a figure. A summary introduces an error that neither the reader nor this publication can see, and citing the summary hides which of the two got it wrong.
Figures are published with their definitions attached. Two institutions counting money for nature very rarely count the same thing, and a total stripped of its definition is worse than no total at all, because it looks solid.
Where two authorities measure differently, the difference is stated on the page rather than smoothed away. Figures built on incompatible definitions are not added together or subtracted from each other.
The source cache
Each cited document is fetched once, stored with the date it was retrieved, and kept for the life of the site. That retrieval date is printed beside the source on the page that uses it. The cache exists so a later challenge can be answered: if a source is revised, moved or withdrawn, the exact version this site read is still on file, and the page can be corrected against it instead of defended from memory.
What a missing figure means
Sometimes the document does not carry the number the page needs. A total is printed without the year it belongs to, a table refuses to add up to its own stated sum, or the publisher's server will not serve the file to anything but a human hand. Where that happens the page says which document was wanted, what it would have settled, and why it could not be used, and the figure is left out. It is never reconstructed from a slug, a file name, a headline or a neighbouring table. A gap that is marked as a gap is information. A guess wearing the clothes of a measurement is not.
Corrections
Corrections are welcome from anyone, including the bodies whose documents are cited. A useful correction identifies the page, quotes the passage, and names the document that shows otherwise. Sourced corrections are made and the page is updated. Where the original source proves to have been wrong, the page records what it previously said, what replaced it, and when. Send them through the contact page.