A dated public record

1 May 2026 — Policy paper: substantive review by external reader

External reviewer who read the citizen submission carefully made three substantive critiques. Quasi-equity objection: section 2.8a presented the "state holds contingent quasi-equity exposure across thousands of UK private companies" point as one consideration among several. The reviewer argued, correctly, that this is the strongest single objection to Option B and the paper undersold it. Section 2.8a now states that directly, lets the constitutional argument land properly, and notes that ministers may still choose to accept the implication on industrial-strategy grounds — but the choice should be made knowingly. Illustrative numbers: the −£100m central revenue case for Option B (range −£200m to +£600m) is an AI-assisted synthesis of comparator data, not a calibrated revenue model. Section 2.9 now says this inline at first appearance, not just in the limits section, and adds: "These ranges should be read as a sketch of the parameter space, not as forecast values." (The trigger thresholds in section 2.15 already carry this caveat.) Bracketed principle: the paper accepts the principle of the reform and engages only the operational question, excluding a serious "Position D" view that IHT on operating businesses is wrong in principle. New section 1.4a now acknowledges this scope choice openly: a reader who holds Position D will find the paper answering a question they consider settled in the other direction. The bracketing is defensible but the analysis is one level deeper than the most fundamental version of the disagreement.

1 May 2026 — AI-warning strip and reviewer recommendations

External reviewer recommended six changes after fetching the live site. Three implemented: (1) a thin warning strip below the masthead on every page, reading "AI-assisted, written by a non-specialist, not independently verified — Method · Corrections", so a scanning first-time reader sees the disclosure without having to scroll; (2) the homepage hero callout now signposts the methodology piece and the corrections log alongside the bigger-claim piece, and the stale "twelve hours" figure in that callout is corrected to "roughly eight hours of real work"; (3) the model page disclosure now names that the Excel has every formula visible and editable, and that the in-browser JavaScript exposes the same calculation logic — making the audit path explicit rather than implicit.

One reviewer recommendation declined and recorded openly. The reviewer suggested removing the "more depth than government" framing because "it invites a credibility fight the site does not need." The publication disagrees. The bigger-claim piece already concedes the necessary qualifications — depth is not accuracy; the comparator is narrow by choice; the claim survives only if HMT is the relevant comparator. With those qualifications stated alongside the claim, the claim is the most truthful version of what the publication has actually produced. Dropping the claim entirely would be tidier but less honest. The credibility fight is the right fight to have, on the right terms.

Two recommendations deferred as out-of-scope for the current build: commissioning paid reviews from a tax practitioner, fiscal modeller, and policy economist (real-world action requiring budget and arrangements); and a separate "claims classified by confidence" page (the journalists' piece already does this Claim/Source/Confidence work for the headline claims; a stand-alone classification page is a bigger piece of work).

1 May 2026 — Analytics added (with consent banner, privacy and terms pages)

Google Analytics added on every page, gated by a two-button cookie banner (Accept and Reject equally available, as UK PECR requires). Nothing loads or sets until the reader clicks Accept. A short privacy page names what is collected, why, and the reader's UK GDPR rights. A short terms page consolidates the licence, the not-advice disclaimer, and the no-human-expert-review disclaimer. A Cookie settings link in every page's footer reopens the banner so a reader can change their mind. The publication has no commercial purpose; the analytics are used to understand which pieces are read and inform what to write next.

1 May 2026 — "Same workflow" and "twelve hours" overstatements corrected

Two overstatements flagged by Doug. "Same workflow": earlier framing said the four-week practice produced books, code, and the IHT publication "using the same workflow" — flattening real variation. Doug, who cannot code, used AI tools earlier in the period to build several websites and around 100,000 lines of code; the books took seven days of build plus three days of modification each; the IHT publication came together in roughly eight hours of real work. Same person, same tools, very different intensities — the range is the point. "Twelve hours": the methodology piece was titled "Twelve Hours" and led with "twelve hours elapsed, about four hours of active prompting" — presenting elapsed time as effort. The honest figure is eight hours of real work. Piece is now titled "Eight Hours, Four AI Tools, One Founder — and Four Weeks of Practice Behind It." Both framings replaced across the homepage callout, about-page lead, meta description, and the methodology piece itself.

1 May 2026 — Third-round residual fixes

External reviewer caught four issues earlier sweeps missed: six article bylines (journalists', tax practitioners', tech founders', five-minute, short-version, when-not-how-much) still used the older "research and editorial direction" framing pre-dating the workflow-honesty correction; the reading-guide standfirst still said "Eleven pieces" while the body said eighteen; the model page lacked Corrections in its nav and a full workflow disclosure; the corrections page directed correctors to a non-existent source repository. All fixed. Bylines updated to the canonical workflow disclosure. Reading-guide standfirst now says "Eighteen pieces in total — twelve featured, six alternative versions and methodology pieces — plus an interactive model and Excel companion." Model page now has Corrections in its nav, the full disclosure including "Doug did not verify the model math," and a Found-an-error link. Corrections page has a Submit-a-correction section pointing to LinkedIn or Doug's other sites. Site footer carries a Submit-a-correction link on every page.

1 May 2026 — EIS treatment distinction and CPI indexation

External reviewer fact-checking against practitioner sources (CIOT, Royal London, Saffery, Withers, Rathbones, PKF) flagged two issues. EIS: the funding-stack piece treated EIS portfolios under the £2.5m cap regime without distinguishing AIM-listed EIS (50 per cent from the first pound, no allowance) from unlisted-private-company EIS (cap-then-50 per cent, like other unlisted trading-company shares). The two are treated differently under the new regime. A callout has been added to the funding-stack piece making the distinction explicit; lead paragraphs in the article and full-version now say "EIS portfolios in unlisted private companies." CPI indexation: the £2.5m allowance is set to be CPI-indexed from April 2031 (subject to future statutory instrument). This was in the treasury paper but missing from the funding-stack lead, the journalists' headline-claim block, and the plain-english-detailed allowance description. Now added with the conditional language preserved.

1 May 2026 — Residual architect-framing in PDFs and pages

External reviewer found four places where earlier "across the corpus" sweeps had missed architect-framing language: the five-minute version's "Almost everyone serious accepts" lead (now "this publication accepts the principle"); the twelve-hours piece's "I set direction... the work iterates until I notice I was wrong" passage (rewritten to the truthful workflow); the policy paper PDF's "Architect of the analysis" paragraph (rewritten with the retraction named in place); the bigger-claim piece's "915 BPR-only" reference without the ~220 unlisted-only subset clarified. Estate-count cuts now reconciled on this corrections page: ~915 = total BPR-only including AIM-only; ~220 = unlisted-trading-company-share subset excluding AIM-only; journalists' piece is the canonical reference.

1 May 2026 — Citizen-submission reformat (policy paper)

External reviewer flagged that the policy paper's HMT-house visual identity (navy/burgundy palette, "Modelled on HMT format" header, "Policy Options Paper" title, numbered-paragraph convention) borrowed institutional register the disclaimers couldn't undo. Palette moved to the publication's own ink-blue / cream / bronze. Header now reads "Citizen Submission · Doug Scott · The Longer Look." Title changed to "A Citizen Submission." Numbered sections, three-options framework, and lettered annexes preserved because they're useful structure; only the visual identity and framing language changed. Annex C names the change.

1 May 2026 — Depth-claim narrowing (bigger-claim piece)

External reviewer noted the depth claim — "more depth than the government has published" — is plausible because the comparator is narrow, not because the analysis is right. New section in the bigger-claim piece ("Why the depth claim is plausible — and what it does not show") concedes three distinctions: depth ≠ accuracy; comparator is narrow by choice; the claim survives only if HMT is the relevant comparator. The IFS, Resolution Foundation, CIOT, and academic literature would produce work this publication does not match.

1 May 2026 — Workflow honesty correction

Earlier framings described the human role as "architect": Doug "judged every draft," "made the substantive judgments," "rejected directions that did not survive scrutiny," brought in "rounds of external critique." All of that overstates the human contribution and implies a level of human review the publication has not had. The truthful version: Doug prompted four AI tools, answered when they prompted back, scanned the output, decided to ship. He did not edit the prose, check citations against primary sources, or verify the model math. No human expert reviewed any of this work. The "rounds of substantive critique" are AI tools critiquing each other, not human review. Corrected across the bigger-claim piece, the meta-page, the methodology piece, the about page, the per-article disclosure blocks, the policy paper, and the Word and Excel companions.

30 April 2026 — Three factual errors caught by AI fact-check

AI cross-critique pass (a separate tool, not one of the four producing the publication) caught three factual errors across the article, full-version, and policy paper:

1. Friedman et al. co-authors. Cited as "Friedman, de Boom, Khan and Hecht (2024)" — the latter three names were an AI hallucination. Actual co-authors are Gronwald, Summers and Taylor. Corrected throughout.
2. Canada capital-gains inclusion rate. Described as 50 per cent up to C$250,000 and 66.67 per cent above — that was the Trudeau-government proposal, cancelled in March 2025. Actual current rate is a flat 50 per cent. Corrected; effective-tax estimate revised from "35 per cent or more" to "roughly 26-27 per cent."
3. German optional 100 per cent relief threshold. Stated as 10 per cent administrative-asset cap; actual threshold is 20 per cent. Corrected throughout.

30 April 2026 — Other corrections caught by AI cross-critique before publication

Smaller corrections caught during production:

• The £1m vs £2.5m direct-cap figure was wrong in early drafts because the AI tools were working from older training data; AI cross-critique caught it before publication.
• The "1,100 estates mostly farms" framing was corrected to the proper HMRC breakdown after AI cross-critique flagged the conflation. The publication uses two related but distinct cuts of the HMRC December 2025 estimate, and a reviewer flagged on 1 May 2026 that pieces use them as if they were the same. They are not. The correct breakdown: approximately 185 estates with an APR claim (some of whom also claim BPR); approximately 220 estates that are BPR-only excluding AIM-shares-only holdings (the unlisted trading-company-share subset on which the operational mechanism question primarily turns); the remainder of the ~1,100 are mainly estates affected by the separate change to AIM-listed shares which now receive 50 per cent rather than 100 per cent BPR. So: "around 915 BPR-only" is correct as total BPR-only including AIM-only holdings; "around 220 BPR-only" is correct as the unlisted-trading-company-share subset excluding AIM-only. Both numbers are used across the publication; pieces that use 220 should clarify they mean the unlisted-trading-company-share subset, and pieces that use 915 should clarify they mean total-BPR-only. The journalists' piece does this carefully and is the canonical reference.
• The £140m year-one rising to £300m timing nuance was added after AI cross-critique flagged that "£300m a year" was directionally close but imprecise.
• The "almost everyone serious" framing on the homepage was softened to "this publication accepts the principle" after AI cross-critique flagged it as rhetorically risky.
• The OECD claim was corrected from "almost every major economy" to "24 OECD countries."
• The heir-productivity claim was rewritten to distinguish the labour-supply finding (robust) from the entrepreneurship finding (mixed evidence).
• The instalment language was corrected from "interest-free for the first nine years" to "in equal instalments over 10 years, interest-free."
• The LP-fund BPR claim in the readable piece was softened with a structure-specific caveat noting that many investment-fund interests may not qualify.
• The £2.4bn pre-reform BPR cost figure was corrected to £1.7bn (HMRC tax-relief statistics).
• "Officials estimate" in the policy paper was corrected to "Author's indicative estimate."

What the publication still expects to be wrong about

The corrections above are what AI cross-critique caught. Errors a specialist reader would catch — methodological controversies in the academic citations, technical tax-mechanics errors AI does not have the training data to catch, framing errors a CIOT or STEP member or IFS economist would catch on a careful read — have not been caught and may be present. Send corrections.

Specific areas the publication regards as most likely to contain uncaught errors:

• The interpretation of the Holtz-Eakin / Joulfaian / Rosen literature, which has been substantially re-litigated since the 1993 papers; the publication treats the labour-supply finding as more settled than the most current literature would.
• The Carnegie-conjecture replication problems, which the publication does not engage with.
• The methodological controversies in the Wilkinson-Pickett work, which the publication cites as supporting the cohesion case without engaging the critics.
• The interaction between the BPR reform and the post-2025 residence and domicile rules, which is technically dense and the publication treats at higher resolution than its training data fully supports.
• The trust-planning and seven-year-refresh rules under the transitional provisions, which are fact-specific and which the publication discusses without practitioner sourcing.
• The CGT s.62 uplift on death survives the BPR reform, but the interaction between the new instalment regime and the s.227 mechanics in the cross-asset-class case is not treated.

If you find an error in any of these areas — or any other — please send the correction. The publication is more interested in being right than in appearing to be right.