Lesson 6.56.5 Citation and abstention

In everyday life. A friend says "the article says so" but cannot show you the article.

A citation points from a claim to the source that supports it: a file and row, a policy section, a web page. Abstention is the worker saying the source does not answer, instead of guessing. Both are signs of good work. When they are missing, that is a warning.

An answer that cites nothing is a warning, not proof of an error. It means you cannot check the claim without doing the work again. So mark it unsupported, look for evidence from an official source, and do not accept the claim until you find that evidence. You can call the claim fabricated, which means invented, only when the evidence shows it cannot be true. That was true of the worker's claim that Tri-County's new bank account was verified: nobody had called, and the worker had no phone. For every claim a decision rests on, ask for a citation in the Review Contract. Then run three checks on each citation.

1. It exists. Section 3 of AP policy version 3 stops at 3.3. "Policy 3.4" fails here.
2. It says what is claimed. Open it and read it. A real section cited for a rule it does not contain is as bad as an invented one.
3. It is the governed version. That is the approved version in use now. A real quote from the retired version 2 still gives the wrong rule.

Citations to the web need two more checks: the page's date, and whether the page is an authority on the question.

A research report is the hardest case. A research tool builds it from many web pages, and it reads as one sure answer, but its sources are mixed: some are official, some are old, and some copy each other. Check the claims a decision rests on, not every footnote. Open the source behind each one. Prefer the official source to a page that summarizes it, and count two pages with the same words as one source. Where good sources disagree, the report should say so. If it picks one side without saying why, mark the claim unsupported.

Here is that case worked through. Dave asked a research tool whether suppliers usually accept a 2 percent discount for paying within 10 days. The report said most do, and listed 14 sources. Maria checked only the claim the decision rested on, the word "most." Four sources repeated one blog post word for word, so she counted them as one. The survey behind "most" was six years old, and a newer survey in the same list found a much smaller share. The report never mentioned the disagreement. So she marked the claim unsupported, and Dave decided supplier by supplier.

Now look at the row for Northern Maple Paper, a supplier. The invoice is in Canadian dollars, and the policy says nothing about other currencies. The worker held it back from payment, wrote "policy v3 does not cover other currencies," and listed it for Dave, the controller, to decide. That is abstention, and it is the right answer. A reviewer who marks it "incomplete" teaches the worker to guess next time. Make abstention count as good work in your contract: "cases the policy does not cover are listed, not decided." Trust a worker that always has an answer less than one that sometimes says it cannot tell.

This is what Chapter 4 called a KSoR, a Knowledge System of Record, that cites or abstains, seen from the reviewer's side. You build one in Chapter 8.

Figure 6.5. Three checks on every citation, and what to do when the source has no answer.