---
name: evidence-check
description: >-
  Check every factual claim in a document against the file of source documents behind it, and return each claim as supported, contradicted or unsupported with a citation on both sides. Use before delivering an appraisal report, a due diligence memo, an expert report or any document whose claims must survive somebody else reading the underlying paperwork.
---

# Evidence check

**Most review tools check a document against itself.** They find the value stated on page 3
that disagrees with page 47. That is worth doing and it is not this. **This skill checks
the document against the evidence file it was built from**, which is where the errors that
cost money actually live: the rent the report used is not the rent in the lease, the year
built came from the listing rather than the assessor, the flood zone was carried over from
a prior assignment.

Written for real estate appraisal, where the evidence set is defined by rule rather than
assembled by guesswork, but the procedure holds anywhere a document rests on a folder of
other documents.

## What you need before starting

1. **The document under test.** One file.
2. **The evidence folder.** Everything the document was built from.

If the user gives you only the document, stop and ask for the folder. **A claim check with
no evidence set is a proofread**, and telling somebody their report is consistent when you
never opened the leases is worse than saying nothing.

## Step 1: inventory the evidence, and say what is missing

List every file in the folder. For each, record the document type, its date, and what
classes of claim it can settle. Then compare that list against what this kind of assignment
should contain.

For a commercial appraisal, the lender is normally required to supply the property
condition report, a current rent roll, operating statements for the prior year and year to
date, executed leases including all amendments and attachments, any ground lease,
easements and regulatory agreements, any purchase agreement from the last three years,
environmental site assessments, and plans or surveys.

**Report the absences before you report anything else.** A missing document means a whole
class of claim cannot be checked, and the user needs to know that before they read a clean
result and relax.

## Step 2: extract the claims, and only the falsifiable ones

Read the document in full and pull every statement that a document could confirm or refute.
Record each with its page and the sentence it came from.

**Take:** numbers, dates, measurements, names, legal status, physical condition, contract
terms, the identity of parties, anything asserted as fact about the property or the market.

**Leave:** opinion, methodology, reasoning, the conclusion of value itself. **An opinion is
not checkable against a document and flagging one as unsupported is a false positive that
teaches the user to ignore you.**

## Step 3: route each claim to the document that should settle it

For every claim, name the document type that ought to carry the answer, then find it.

**The rule that catches the most errors: a summary is not evidence for what it
summarizes.** A rent roll summarizes leases, so it settles nothing about a lease term. When
the claim is about rent, escalation, a renewal option or a reimbursement, the evidence is
the executed lease and its amendments, and the rent roll is a second claim to be checked
in its own right. The same holds for a broker's setup sheet against a survey, and a listing
against an assessor record.

When two documents both bear on a claim and disagree, that is a finding, not a problem to
resolve quietly.

## Step 4: one of three verdicts, with both citations

**Use the appraiser's words for them, which are TIES OUT, CONFLICTS and NOTHING BEHIND IT.**

**TIES OUT.** Quote the supporting text and give its document and page. Do not paraphrase
either side. **The value here is not the verdict, it is the citation**, because that is the
index of what backs the document.

**CONFLICTS.** Quote the claim and quote the evidence, side by side, and state the
difference in plain terms. This is the finding that saves a revision request.

**NOTHING BEHIND IT.** Nothing in the folder settles it. **Say which document type you looked for
and did not find**, so the user can tell a missing file from a claim that was never
checkable.

**Never convert absence into support.** If you cannot find the evidence, the verdict is NOTHING
BEHIND IT. A confident TIES OUT with a vague citation is the single worst output this skill can
produce, because it is exactly the claim the reader will stop checking.

## Step 5: date discipline, applied to every verdict

An evidence document can be correct and too old. Check the date of each source against the
effective date of the document under test, and flag any source that post-dates it, because
a report cannot rest on information that did not exist when it was written.

Some documents carry their own currency rule, such as a rent roll required to be dated
within sixty days of inspection. Apply the rule where one exists and state the gap in days
where one does not.

## Step 6: report in the order that matters

1. **What is missing from the file**, from Step 1.
2. **Conflicts**, worst first, meaning the ones that move a number or a legal conclusion.
3. **Nothing behind it**, grouped by the document type that would have settled each one,
   because that turns a list of problems into one request for three files.
4. **Ties out**, as a citation table rather than prose, ready to go into the workfile.

Give counts at the top. A reader who sees "41 claims checked, 3 contradicted, 7
unsupported" knows whether to read on.

## What this skill will not do

**It does not decide whether the document is right.** A contradiction between the report
and a lease may mean the report is wrong, the lease was superseded by an amendment you were
not given, or the author had a reason they did not record. **Report the disagreement and
let the professional resolve it.** Never edit the document, never adjust a number to match,
and never suppress a finding because it looks minor.

**It does not check arithmetic it cannot see the inputs to.** If a figure is derived rather
than sourced, say it is derived and name what it was derived from.

**It does not replace a reviewer.** It finds what a reviewer cannot hold in their head
across an eighty-page document and a folder of forty files, which is a different job from
judging the work.