If we got it wrong, tell us.

The standard every entry has to meet

An action stays in the record only while all of this is true:

• It is a specific thing the company did: a policy, a donation, a payment decision, a statement, a filing. Not a plan, not a rumor, not something an employee said.
• It has a date, and that date is when it actually happened.
• It has a live source that a reader can open and check, and the source actually says what the entry says.
• It is attached to the right company. The right legal entity, the right brand, and not a similarly named one.

If any of those four fails, the entry comes out, whichever direction it pointed. We do not keep a weak entry because we think the conclusion is right anyway.

What we will correct

Wrong facts

The action did not happen, happened differently, or happened on another date. Send us what actually happened and where it is documented.

The wrong company

This is the error we hunt hardest, because it is the easiest one to make and the most unfair when it lands. Public filings are searched by name, and names collide: a politician can share a surname with an advocacy group, an acronym can belong to a completely different trade association, and two unrelated companies can trade under one word. We resolve donations to committee identifiers rather than trusting a printed name, and we still expect to get some wrong.

The same applies to storefronts. Business listings come from a public mapping dataset and contain duplicates, closures and franchise locations filed under the wrong parent. If a corporate record has been applied to a business that is not part of that chain (an independent franchisee, a same-name business with no connection), tell us and we will detach it.

A source that no longer holds

Links rot. If the source behind an entry is dead and we cannot find the action documented anywhere else, the entry comes out. An entry with no working evidence is not a lighter claim than a wrong one; it is the same claim with nothing behind it.

An action we are missing

A record can be wrong by omission. If a company has done something the record does not show, in either direction, send it and we will research it like any other submission. The fastest route is report the action, which puts it straight in the queue.

A company that changed course

Reversals are the most important thing we can get right, and the easiest to get lazy about. If a company reversed a policy, we do not delete the original. We add the reversal, dated, with its own source. Both stay on the record, and the grading method weights the more recent one more heavily, so a genuine change of course shows up as one.

What we will not change

• An accurate, sourced entry, because you would rather it were not published. What a company did is a matter of public record. The remedy is a reply, published beside it.
• The grade itself, when the entries behind it are right. The method is published. If you think the method is wrong, argue with the method and we will listen, but that is a different conversation from an error.
• An entry because it is old. Age is handled by the method: an old action counts for less over time, and a record too old to support a letter shows no grade rather than a stale one. Removing history would be a worse answer than aging it.
• A review, because it is unflattering. Reviews are opinion. They are averaged into the Consumer Grade and never touch the record grade, so an unflattering one is not an error in the record. We will remove one that is abusive, off-topic, or clearly not from a real customer.

How to report an error

Email 2a@free2carry.com. To get it fixed fastest, include:

• The page it is on, as a link.
• Which entry: the headline and its date.
• What is wrong, in a sentence.
• What is right, and where that is documented. A link is worth more than an assertion, from anyone, including the company.

You do not need an account, and you do not need to say who you are. A correction from an anonymous reader is treated exactly like one from a company’s legal department: we go and check.

What happens next

• We aim to acknowledge within three business days and tell you what we are doing.
• If an entry cannot be stood up, it comes out immediately: the same day we confirm it, before we have finished discussing anything else. Grades recompute automatically once it does.
• If it needs research, we research it and come back with what we found, whichever way that goes.
• If we are not going to change it, we will say so and why. You will get a reason, not silence.

Every change to a subject’s grade is logged with its date, so a correction is a recorded event rather than a quiet edit.

Right of reply

If this is your business, you can claim the listing and publish a reply that appears with your record. We do not edit replies for content. It is the better remedy in almost every case: a company explaining its own decision, in its own words, next to the entry, tells a reader more than the entry’s absence would.

Errors we have already made

Stating this plainly, because a corrections policy from a publication that implies it has never been wrong is not worth reading. We have attributed political donations to the wrong organization because two shared an acronym, dated a set of actions to before the event that caused them, recorded a corporate action against a duplicate listing rather than the real one, and published grades that leaned on evidence far too old to carry them.

Each of those was found and fixed. We expect to find more, and we would rather you found them first and told us.

Related

How grades work · Report an action · Terms of Use