North Carolina pilot jurisdiction
How the evidence is handled
The platform separates official records, normalized data, calculations, platform observations, and confirmed official findings. A source link and locator accompany every material extracted figure.
Sources
Government-published records are the primary evidence. State filing portals and official repositories are used when they are the authoritative filing source. News reports and third-party summaries may guide discovery but do not replace primary records.
Verification
Source verified means the document and locator were reviewed. Repository verified means the official collection and its publisher were confirmed. Only verified entries appear on public pages.
Calculations
Currency is displayed in whole dollars unless a source supplies a rate or percentage. Budget-used percentages equal actual expenditures divided by the current amended budget. County-supplied percentages are identified as such. Rounding can cause displayed parts not to total exactly.
Budget vs. actual
An adopted budget is legal spending authority and a financial plan. A monthly actual is activity recorded through a stated date. A variance is not, by itself, evidence of waste, misconduct, or a final overage.
Corrections
Revised sources, extraction corrections, and methodology changes retain version history. Material corrections state what changed, when, and why.
Permanent public-interest boundaries
Free access, privacy, and neutral language
- No account, subscription, pricing tier, or CivDIP access is required to understand or verify public information.
- Official audit findings are labeled as official findings. Platform observations are labeled separately.
- Sensitive identifiers, banking data, protected addresses, minors' information, and similar exposed data are not republished.
- The current site has no account system, application database, behavioral analytics, or shared search history. Search terms remain in the visitor's browser state.
- Short-lived, privacy-preserving technical counters may limit abusive automated traffic. They do not contain search terms or create visitor profiles.
- CivBudget does not request or process exact home addresses. A future integration may receive a non-identifying public-jurisdiction identifier, never the address used to determine it.
- CivDIP may receive a public record or entity identifier only after a user deliberately chooses a future Research in CivDIP action.
Product boundary
Public verification here. Investigative work in CivDIP.
The current fiscal year, prior-year comparison, major figures, vendors, contracts, and official findings belong on this public site.
Every material figure keeps its official publisher, reporting period, source link, locator, and calculation explanation free on CivBudget.
Bulk source collections, saved investigations, private notes, relationship graphs, monitoring, extended history, and professional reports belong in CivDIP.
CivDIP may reduce the work required to investigate public information, but it is never required to understand or verify a figure displayed by CivBudget.
Responsible access
Verification without repackaging the research corpus
CivBudget provides the official link and locator needed to verify each material figure. It does not publish a bulk source directory, document mirror, unrestricted data API, or full-dataset export. Automated bulk harvesting, systematic replication of the compilation, and attempts to bypass reasonable access controls are not permitted. Government records remain subject to their publishers' terms, and public facts remain public.
Current collection status
Manual review with visible limitations
The active jurisdiction dataset uses a manually reviewed source registry, entity census, and financial extraction. Automated collection, revision detection, archived copies, and review queues are being added over time. The import and review labels on each record state the current process accurately.