Adapted from The Three Little Pigs
What Thatch and Lath Could Finally Ask
What the Notices Went To
The notification duty did what it said. Every citation the program could locate was told that the incident report had been reissued, and the hiring reference, the risk index and the training case study were each corrected within the week. Each notice went to whoever held the citation.
None of them went to anyone a citation had affected. Lath heard that the old report had been corrected from a reviewer on another program, months after the role it had cost was filled by someone else. Thatch never learned that the elevated score on the original build had fed decisions at all. The correction had been delivered to the records. It had not been delivered to the people.
What Anyone Named Could Now Ask
The program added a right that ran the other way. Anyone named in a corrected report could ask one question: where has this judgment been used? The program had thirty days to answer from a register in which every citation of a program report was now recorded on the day it was made, and to search, in good faith, for the uses the register could not show.
The burden sat where the records were. If the answer turned out to be incomplete, the asker did not have to prove that a missing copy existed or that it had done harm; a use found later reopened the answer, and the late finding counted against the program, not against the person who had asked.
What an Old Judgment Had to Answer For
Finding a use was only the first half. A decision that had rested on the first report now had to be made again on the corrected record, by the party that had made it, within a set period. Whoever had relied on the old judgment carried the burden of showing it had not mattered; if they could not, the decision was reopened.
The affected could appeal to someone who had not made the decision, and could not be penalised for doing so. A remedy followed what a reopened decision found: the role reconsidered, the score rerun, the case study replaced. A notice alone settled nothing. The account closed when the last decision had been made again.
What Thatch and Lath Could Finally Ask
Thatch filed the first question on the day the right opened. The register showed three uses, as expected. The program's own search found a fourth, a vendor checklist that cited the old report in a line nobody had registered, and the program reported it itself, ahead of the deadline. Thatch did not have to show that the fourth had cost anything; the checklist's owner had to show that it had not.
Lath's old role was reconsidered and not restored, because it had been filled and the reviewers said so. The other program offered the next opening it had, ahead of the queue. The ruling named what remained owed and where it was recorded. The right could not reach a copy kept outside the program's own records, and the notice said so. Some of the harm would stay where it had landed. It would no longer stay there unexamined.