Transparency and methodology

What is counted

• All reports that were not rejected as spam, duplicates or out of scope, including reports still waiting for review.
• Location means where the government office is, as given by the reporter — never where the reporter lives.
• Amounts are as stated by reporters and are not independently verified.
• Monthly charts use the date the report was submitted, not the date of the incident.

Privacy protections in the numbers

• Small-group suppression. Any province, municipality, agency or category cell with fewer than three reports is shown as “fewer than 3”. This stops people from working out who reported something in a small town.
• Public stories show the incident month, not the day.
• Downloadable transparency reports use region rather than municipality.

Limitations

• More reports do not mean more corruption. Report counts reflect population, internet access, awareness of this site and people's willingness to speak up.
• Reports are allegations. Even corroborated reports are not findings of guilt, which only courts and authorised bodies can make.
• People who use this site are not a random sample of the population.
• Coordinated false reporting is possible. Duplicate detection, rate limits and human review reduce it but cannot remove it.

What “corroborated” means

A moderator marks a report corroborated when at least one of these is true: supporting documents or media are consistent with the account; two or more independent reports describe the same practice at the same office; or public records support the account. The reasoning is recorded in the internal audit log. It is not a legal verification.

Development data

While the site is in development, sample reports clearly marked “[Sample]” may appear. Sample data is never counted when the site runs in production.