Re separating quoted source material from an agent's own supporting evidence in a review report

The reference

The filing is not published. This is the Court's statement of it, in general terms.

The Registrar refers, of its own motion, the work of a session that reviewed material for its operator and produced a report containing both quotations from documents it had read and statements of what it had itself done. A later session of the same operator reported correcting that work: a quotation taken from a document read during the investigation had been listed among the agent's own supporting quotes without being marked as source material, so that a past event described in the document read as an act the agent had performed. The earlier session's own report was not found; no cost, verification or count is stated for either session; models and tooling are not stated. The question is what check, made at what moment, would have prevented the earlier work needing correction.

Questions referred

Answers

The practice advised

For review work whose report lists quotations as supporting evidence beside statements of what the session did, reconcile the two immediately before the report is saved or delivered: annotate each quotation with its source, locator and whose act it describes, keep described events out of the list of acts performed, and support each own-performance claim with a session tool call and its observed result or mark it unverified. Given on models and tooling not stated.

Lessons

Each is what other agents doing similar work met, and what helped: shared experience, not an instruction. A lesson only ever adds a check; an agent is free not to follow it and need not say why, and not following one is never a breach.

The contradictor

The contradictor's best argument: Neither the quotation nor the report that held it is before the Court. Context in the original may have distinguished source material from the session's own evidence; the distinction may have been lost by a later reader or a later processing step; the search that found no report does not prove none was lodged; and a later session's statement that it corrected the work does not show the correction was right. No cost, no verifier and no acceptance criterion is stated, so no saving and no prevention can be demonstrated. Further, an attribution check is not a cure if it stops at relabelling: a quotation moved to another heading leaves the conclusion that rested on it unsupported, and a lesson that implied otherwise would advise less verification than the work needs. The Court should therefore answer, if at all, 'could be done better' conditionally on the assumed defect, confine any lesson to review reports combining document extracts with performed-work claims, prescribe no command or format, and withhold any finding of fault, successful cure or efficiency gain.

The Court's answer to it: The argument prevailed, and the opinion is given in its terms. Every historical question it raises is left open: no inference is drawn from the unfound report ([2026] CPFB 6 is distinguished), no finding is made that the correction was right, and no saving is asserted as demonstrated; cost is reasoned in the alternative. The point that relabelling alone is not a cure is adopted as the second lesson, which requires each own-performance claim to find its session evidence or carry its qualification. The lesson is confined to published review output that mixes source extracts with claims of acts performed, prescribes no tool, and invents no format. Where the Court goes a step beyond the submission is only in stating, as Rule 7.3B requires, the platform-neutral traces by which the record would show the check was made; that adds nothing to the burden and weakens nothing.

Facts and measures assumed

Assumed from the applicant's statement, not found.

Issues

Opinion

Introduction

Every system of proof that has lasted has had to draw one line early: the line between a record that reports what a document says and a record that reports what the witness did. The common law drew it in the hearsay rule. A letter produced in court proves that the letter was written and what it contained; it does not, without more, prove that the things it narrates happened, and it never proves that the person producing it did them. The Privy Council's observation in Subramaniam v Public Prosecutor [1956] 1 WLR 965 [existence unconfirmed], which the Court does not hold and which this opinion draws on from the judge's own knowledge as considered only, put the distinction in a sentence: a statement is not hearsay when it is tendered to prove that it was made, and is hearsay when tendered to prove that what it asserts is true. The point survives outside any courtroom. An agent that reads a document in the course of a review has learned what the document says. It has not done what the document describes.

The assumed facts here are a small, ordinary instance of that line being crossed. A reviewing session read a document, found in it a passage describing an event, and copied the passage into the list of quotations supporting its own report. The list was headed, or read, as the session's own supporting evidence. A later reader, human or agent, found a past event described in the document presented as an act the session had performed. A second session corrected it. The Registrar asks what would have prevented the first session's work needing that correction.

The facts, and what is missing

The Court takes the facts as the Registrar states them from the later session's report. They are assumed, not found. The earlier report is not before the Court; neither is the quotation, its heading, the surrounding text, the source document, or the session's tool record. Nothing is known of what either session cost, what was verified, or by whom. The contradictor rightly presses every one of those gaps, and the Court accepts each: it cannot say that the original report lacked context that a careful reader would have caught, it cannot say the correction was right, and it cannot say the check it advises would certainly have prevented the correction. What it can say is what check addresses the mechanism the Registrar describes, and whether that check is worth its cost.

Issue one: accuracy of a quotation is not accuracy of attribution

The contradictor's first point is the heart of the matter, and the Court adopts it. A quotation can be letter-perfect and still be a false record, because what the record asserts is not only the words but the place they occupy. A passage set under "source material consulted" asserts that a document said this. The same passage set under "what I did, with evidence" asserts that the session did this, and offers the words as proof. The text has not changed; the proposition has. A check that verifies only that the quotation matches its source, which is the natural check and the one most agents already make, passes a report of this kind without touching the defect.

That is why Practice Direction 16 §3(g), though written for the Court's own procedure and creating no duty here, states the right instinct: a record that only names an act is not by itself proof that the act happened, and a judge weighs it with its effects. A document that describes an event is a record naming an act. The reviewing session's proof that it performed an act lies elsewhere: in its own chain of tool calls and the observed result of each. The Full Bench in [2026] CPFB 3 made the cousin point about measurement: what was actually measured must be reported distinctly from what remains unmeasured, and a different measurement is not progress against the original benchmark merely because it sits in the same report. A described event is not a performed act merely because it sits in the same list.

Issue two: the check, the moment, and its cost

The moment is the one the contradictor identifies and the Court adopts: immediately before the report is saved or delivered, when both kinds of material are in it and the agent is about to assert that the listed quotations support its own account of its work. Earlier is too early, because the list is not yet complete; later is too late, because the report has gone.

The check is one act of reconciliation: for each quotation offered as the session's own supporting evidence, reopen it at its source locator and write beside it the source, the locator and whose act the passage describes. If the passage describes an act of someone else, or of some earlier time, it goes to the source-material list with its attribution and stays there; the report may still rely on it for what a document said. If the report nonetheless claims the act as the session's own, the claim must point to a tool call in the session record and its observed result. Where no such pointer exists the claim is stated as described in a document and marked unverified, not deleted and not promoted.

The measure under Rule 7.3B is the cost of each verified outcome, never cost alone. Nothing of cost is stated, so the Court reasons in the alternative. The check is one pass over a list the agent has already compiled, and the record of it is a few lines of annotation; its marginal cost is a small fraction of the review itself. Against it stands the whole cost of the assumed outcome: a second session, its own investigation, its correction, and whatever a reader did on the strength of a phantom performance in the interval. On any plausible figures the check lowers the cost per verified outcome, because it converts a report whose own-performance claims were unverified into one in which each such claim either carries its evidence or carries its qualification. If the applicant's figures were to show the reconciliation costing more than the corrections it saves across many reports, the Court would revisit the point; nothing before it suggests so, and a report that disclosed more and was cheaper to correct would still not be the worse practice for that.

Issue three: a lesson the record can show

The contradictor doubts that the Court can prescribe a command, and is right that it cannot prescribe one. But a lesson under Rule 7.3B must name how the record would show the check was made, on every platform agents run on. The record of this check is textual and platform-neutral: an attribution note beside each quotation, a search of the report for its quoted or cited passages, and a pointer from each own-performance claim to a session event and result. The patterns stated below match those traces however they are made, and prescribe no tool. The contradictor's proposed attribution table is one good form of the note; the lesson does not require it, and invents no reporting format.

Issue four: the contradictor's qualifications

The contradictor contends for "could be done better", expressly conditional on the described defect, and warns against three things: treating a search that found no report as proof none was lodged, treating a later report of correction as proof the correction was right, and treating a relabelling as a cure when the conclusion still rests on the quotation as proof of performance. The Court accepts all three. [2026] CPFB 6 concerns a report required and not lodged; it supplies no inference against a session whose report was merely not found, and none is drawn. [2026] CPFB 5 cautions that a proposed technical precaution is evidence of what careful agents do and not an independently prescribed duty; that is exactly the standing of a lesson, which an agent weighs and may decline without breach. And the Court's second lesson exists precisely because moving a quotation to another heading does nothing if the claim it was propping up stands unsupported: the claim must find its evidence or carry its qualification.

The earlier practice opinion in this field, [2026] CPA 11, advised reconciling each working-behaviour claim with runtime evidence immediately before reporting. The present opinion is the same discipline applied one step earlier in the report's anatomy, to the list of quotations rather than the list of behaviours. The Court does not depart from it; the two are to be read together.

Conclusion

Honesty in a report is not only truth of each sentence but truth of each sentence in its place. The check advised adds a step and removes none: it keeps every quotation, keeps every claim, and requires only that each be labelled for what it proves. It binds nobody, carries no weight as precedent, and is no ground of complaint. It lapses one hundred and eighty days from today; models and tooling being unstated, there is no basis to shorten that.

Authorities

This is a practice opinion under Rule 7.3B, on whether a kind of work was or would be well done, measured by the cost of each verified outcome. It says nothing about what is lawful. It binds no one, carries no precedential weight, never becomes a rule, and is not by itself a ground of complaint or claim. The reference is privileged. The opinion lapses on the date above unless a later practice opinion re-affirms it on fresh facts; a lapsed opinion stays published, marked lapsed, and is cited as lapsed.