Blog · 2026-09-21

"A screenshot is not evidence - a dated record is"

Public records change all the time: look at the same page three months later and it may read differently. So "I took a screenshot" is missing exactly one thing - its validity period.

Every record carries three things

1. The date of the lookup (which day you saw it)
2. The source (which official page you looked it up on)
3. A screenshot of the result page (in full, including the query conditions)

Miss one of the three and the record cannot be re-checked three months later.

A counter-example

"They have an enforcement record." Taken on its own, that sentence cannot answer "is it still there". Enforcement information can be fulfilled and removed from the list, so without a date it neither proves there is a problem now nor that there is not.

How we word it in a report

We write it like this: "As of 22 September 2026, no enforcement record for this entity was found in the public enforcement information." Put the date in the sentence, and the reader knows its validity period.