Editorial standards | Reviewed 27 October 2026
You should be able to check our work.
This site makes claims about law, regulation, government process, credit reporting, lending, and insurance. Those are subjects where being confidently wrong causes real harm, so here is exactly how the material gets made.
How a claim gets to the page: primary source, linked at the claim, dated on review.
1200 x 750Sourcing
Where the facts come from
- Primary authorities only for anything about consumer rights, dispute procedures, government processes, or program rules. The FTC, CFPB, IRS, SBA, the Federal Register, state agencies, state insurance regulators, and the credit bureaus' own documentation.
- Sources linked at the claim, on the page where the claim appears, rather than collected in a bibliography nobody reads.
- Marketing blogs are not a source for any regulated claim, including ones that happen to be correct. If the only place we can confirm something is a competitor's content, we don't publish it.
- State variation is flagged, not smoothed over. Where a requirement differs by state, the page says so and sends you to your own state's authority instead of generalizing.
- We cite the rule, not the commentary about the rule. On subjects that move, secondary coverage ages badly and the underlying document doesn't.
Dates
A review date means somebody looked
Pages carry a review date indicating when the content was last checked against its sources. It is a statement that a person verified the claims on that day, not a timestamp a publishing system generated when a file was touched.
Rules change. Thresholds move, programs get amended, agency guidance is updated, and at least one federal reporting requirement on this site has changed twice in two years. A date tells you how much to trust what you're reading.
No backdating. No fabricated publication dates to suggest an older archive. No republishing old content with a fresh date to look current. No placeholder articles presented as finished work.
Where a subject area has nothing published yet, the Knowledge Center says so rather than filling the gap.
Standing prohibitions
What will never appear on this site
Not "what we try to avoid." These are rules, and they hold whatever the traffic argument for breaking them.
- Fabricated proof of any kind. No invented reviews, testimonials, case studies, client results, funding amounts, or credit score improvements.
- Invented credentials. No licenses, certifications, partnerships, awards, media mentions, or years in business that we can't substantiate.
- Guarantees nobody can make. No promised score increases, deletions, approvals, limits, rates, or timelines.
- Techniques built on misrepresentation. No credit sweeps, CPNs, synthetic identities, false identity theft reports, aged shelf entities, or inaccurate statements to lenders.
- Education that's really a sales page. No article that withholds the useful part to force a conversation.
- FAQ entries written for markup. Every question on this site is one people actually ask. None exist to generate search result features.
- Legal advice. NCC does not provide it, and no page here will imply otherwise.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know
Material corrections to substantive claims are made to the page and the review date is updated. Where a correction changes the meaning of previous guidance, the page says what changed rather than quietly editing it.
Report an error through the contact page. You don't need to be a client, it doesn't put you on a list, and a correction that comes from a reader is worth more to us than one we find ourselves.
Money and incentives
Where our interests sit, stated plainly
- Compensation is disclosed at the point of mention. Where NCC earns anything from a third-party product, the page describing it says so next to the link, not in a footer.
- The tools page carries no affiliate links. That page is government resources and free official sources only, and that will not change.
- Where we recommend something and earn nothing, we say that too. An unpaid recommendation is worth more than a paid one, and readers deserve to know which they're reading.
- Our commercial interest is in people who want help. Not in clicks, not in referral volume, and not in keeping anyone dependent on us.
The full picture is on the disclosures page.
Why publish this at all
Because most sites in this industry couldn't
A page like this is only worth writing if you intend to be held to it. Ours is specific on purpose: you can check any claim on this site against the source we cited, and you can tell us when we've got something wrong.
If you find a page that breaks one of the rules above, that's a reportable error and we'll treat it as one.
Found something wrong?
Tell us what and where. Corrections get made to the page with the review date updated, and we'd rather hear it from you than leave it sitting there.