Editorial policy

What decides a verdict, and what only explains it?

A deterministic engine decides; prose explains. Comparable selection, ratios, dispersion, confidence and the verdict itself are pure TypeScript with no dependencies and no network access, computing in integer cents so a hearing officer can re-run the arithmetic by hand and get the same answer. Content pages are written against the same versioned county rules files the engine reads, which is what keeps prose and computation from drifting apart. Where a figure appears in a sentence on this site, it came from the engine or from a cited rules file.

How rules get onto this site

County rules are encoded from primary sources only — the county authority, the state statute, or the state tax court — never from another website's summary. Each rule carries its citation and a last-verified date, visible on every county page. A rule we cannot cite does not ship; a rule we have drafted but not yet confirmed is labelled “awaiting primary-source verification” until it is.

Each county file carries a ruleset version and effective dates, so a rule change is a new dated file rather than an edit to code. The loader enforces the citation requirement rather than trusting the author: a New Jersey Director's Ratio entry without its own citation is rejected outright, which is one reason that table is currently empty rather than populated from memory.

What closes a verification gap?

A primary source that was actually fetched and read. A secondary source may cross-check a value; it may never close a gap, and rows resting on one stay labelled until the authoritative document is read. Where a source is unreachable, the encoded value is left alone and the gap is recorded — not quietly improved with a plausible substitute. That is why several Cook County values remain flagged: the Assessor's own site could not be read from the verification environment at all, so its residential assessment level, its appeal fee and its evidence rules are recorded as unresolved rather than filled in.

The point of the rule is that a county's own page is authoritative for its own procedure, and only for that. Bergen County's FAQ gives $750,000 as the threshold for filing directly with the Tax Court; the Division of Taxation's handbook gives $1,000,000 for a regular valuation appeal, and the county figure is the separate added-and-omitted threshold. The engine carries $1,000,000. Being a county source does not make a statement right about a state statute.

Where AI is used — and where it never is

The calculation engine contains no AI: comparable selection, ratios, confidence, and verdicts are deterministic statistics, unit-tested, with zero network access. AI is never permitted to compute a value, select a comparable, or decide a verdict. In later phases AI may help read documents you upload (always behind a review screen you confirm) and draft narrative text (with every number validated against the engine's output). Nothing you enter in the checker today leaves your browser.

Corrections

Found a wrong deadline, fee, or formula? Email info@bracketsight.com. Confirmed errors are fixed in the rules data, noted in the changelog within 48 hours, and the affected pages update automatically. A wrong number here can cost a real person a real appeal window — we treat corrections as the highest-priority work there is.

Corrections are published rather than quietly applied, including the embarrassing ones. Bergen's filing fee shipped as a flat $25 when the statutory schedule runs to $150, and the fee is verdict-affecting because estimated savings are compared against it — a home above $1,000,000 assessed was being quoted a fee six times too low. Both New Jersey appeal form links returned 404. Both were fixed on 15 August 2026 and recorded with what changed and why.

Funding and independence

Bracketsight plans to earn revenue from advertising on content pages, a one-time paid appeal packet, and clearly labelled referrals to contingency services for counties we do not yet cover. None of these influence a verdict: the engine has no knowledge of monetization, takes no input from it, and an honest “not worth filing” is the product's core promise. Ads never appear inside the tool. The incentive runs the wrong way on purpose — the tool tells most users their assessment looks fair, and refuses to give a New Jersey verdict at all, neither of which is the revenue-maximising answer.

Who has reviewed the county playbooks?

Nobody yet. Launch policy requires a named, credentialed property-tax consultant or attorney to review the methodology and every county playbook, and no such reviewer is engaged today. The verification pass that produced the citations on this site checked whether encoded values match their cited sources — a much narrower question than whether a county playbook is legally sufficient to act on. Until that review is complete, this site is a pre-launch build and says so — see about.

How often is each rule re-checked?

On the cadence each publisher actually keeps. New Jersey's Chapter 123 average ratios are republished every 1 April and must be re-pulled annually. Cook County's township open and close calendars are republished each session, so a deadline verified last year proves nothing about this one. New Jersey's filing-fee tiers and its Tax Court threshold change only by statute. Form revision codes change without notice, which is why the PDF links are re-fetched each year rather than assumed — two of them were already dead when they were last checked.