A number can be true on Monday and wrong by Friday
Some facts expire on a schedule nobody tells the reader about. A quarterly figure, a litigation status, a safety statement, all of them can be correct the day they are published and misleading a week later, once an amended filing or a restatement changes the record they rest on.
The article was accurate when it published. The filing underneath it has since moved on.
Fact checking is not a single event
An article written before a correction lands keeps circulating after it, in search results, in an aggregator's summary, in a model's generated answer. The primary record has moved on. The downstream copy has not. Nothing forces a stale figure to update itself, so it does not, until someone happens to notice the mismatch by hand.
Item 4.02 non reliance filings, the formal mechanism a company uses to tell the market a prior statement should not be trusted, have been filed more than eight thousand times since being introduced. Research on stock reaction finds the market treats these filings as material news, moving the price by roughly six percent on average the day they land. Everything written before that filing, and still circulating after it, is quietly out of date.
Attaching an expiry date to a claim
A financial figure, to Merlise, is not frozen at the moment someone checked it. It carries a source date and a freshness policy, and it gets rechecked whenever a new 8-K, an amended 10-Q, or a non reliance disclosure appears. Nothing changes, and Merlise says so instead of raising a false alarm. Something changes, and the claim gets marked stale, with the update explained in one sentence rather than buried inside a generic warning.
The primary record gets the last word. If the filing changes, the claim tied to it needs to change too, and a reader should be able to see exactly when that happened and why.
The evidence ledger
The same claim by claim view the product shows on a live document, built from this case.
How it resolves
The resolving record
SEC Item 4.02 filings and the audit research on their market impact establish that a stale financial claim is a routine, measurable risk rather than a hypothetical one.
SEC EDGAR, Item 4.02 filings; Audit Analytics research on restatement reactions