How the Register reaches a pass or fail

Our standard states the ten things we check for. This page states how we actually check them — the three kinds of evidence behind every assessment, what has to be true before a provider is named publicly, and what stays out of that process entirely.

Three inputs, every assessment

1. Licensing or registration status, verified directly against the regulator. Not a company's own "licensed and bonded" claim — the actual state insurance-department or licensing-agency roster (California DOI's Company Profile search, Texas TDLR's registrant list, and so on) or the equivalent Canadian provincial regulator, for every jurisdiction a provider actually operates in that we're able to check. See our guide to a US regulator's own data and Canadian provincial regulator directory for exactly which tool this means, state by state and province by province.

2. Regulator complaint and enforcement data. A state insurance department's or attorney general's own enforcement actions, consent orders, and court filings; where a regulator publishes one, its own complaint ratio or index; and, as a supplementary, non-governmental signal, Better Business Bureau complaint volume and pattern — reported honestly as volume and pattern, never treated as proof that any single complaint was valid.

3. Document review. The provider's own sample contract, policy documents, and marketing materials, read directly against the specific language of the ten-point standard — does the exclusions list actually appear before purchase, does the marketing copy contradict the provider's own contract terms, is the entity actually backing the contract named and not just a marketing brand.

The bar for a public "pass" is higher than "nothing failed"

A provider appears by name in the Register's passing directory only once every applicable point on our standard is independently corroborated to primary-source strength — the regulator's own roster, the regulator's own enforcement record, the provider's own published contract. A result where no violation was found, but a specific point still rests on a secondary source or couldn't be independently confirmed this round, is not treated as a pass for public-listing purposes; it stays unlisted until that gap closes on a later reassessment. That's a deliberately higher bar than "we didn't find anything wrong" — see the Register page for the current aggregate totals this produces.

Reassessment, not a one-time verdict

Licensing status, complaint records, and contract terms all change after we look. Every assessment carries a reassessment date, and a provider's status is re-checked against the same three inputs above at that point rather than assumed to hold indefinitely.

Why a failing provider stays anonymous, and a passing one doesn't

See the Register page for the full reasoning. In short: we report a failing result in aggregate because it's our own conclusion against a standard we wrote, and we'd rather be conservative about what we assert publicly about a specific business. A passing result is different — it names a provider for meeting objective, checkable requirements, not for accusing it of anything.

Independent verification, before anything is published

Every fact behind an assessment — a licensing status, a dollar figure in a settlement, a docket or case number — is cross-checked against multiple independent sources before it's relied on, with the primary regulator or court record itself weighted above a secondary summary of it. Where a specific point can't be independently confirmed in a given round, the assessment says so directly rather than treating an unverified claim as a fact.

What never factors into a finding

See our editorial policy for the full commitment; the relevant piece here is that whether a provider participates, or could ever participate, in a paid relationship with this site has no bearing on its grade. No provider can pay to change a finding, pay for inclusion in the passing directory, or pay to have a failing result suppressed or softened. As of this writing, this site has no paid placements, no affiliate links, and no advertiser relationships of any kind — every finding published so far was reached with zero financial relationship to any provider being evaluated.