What it reads, and what it tells you it could not.

Routing

Every file is routed by what it is rather than by what it is called.

In the field a file name is often wrong: a photograph saved with a spreadsheet extension, an upload that a browser declares as an unknown type, a message exported from a phone with no extension at all.

LitFin Intelligence decides what a file is by opening it, not from its name or the type the sender declared. A reader that trusts the name returns an empty document and calls it a read, and nothing downstream can tell.

A forwarded email is read as a document, with its body and every attachment. An archive is opened and its members are read.

A file that cannot be routed is reported as unsupported, by name, and counted. No page is skipped quietly: it is read, or it is named.

Photographed pages

Most of a farmer's credit file was never a document.

Much of the evidence was printed, signed, stamped and then photographed, so there is no text to extract. The page is read as a page, with each word kept at its position on the sheet.

Position is what the next two steps depend on.

A stamp located on page nine can be quoted back, checked against that page and shown to a committee. A stamp listed as present cannot.

Authenticity

Reading a statement is not the same as believing it.

A document can be complete, legible and wrong, by error or by intent. Neither shows to a reader that only lifts text off the page.

A statement is therefore checked against the rest of its own document, and what does not hold is reported. The tests are not published, apart from the identifier check below, for the reason a lender does not publish its own back-office checks: they are only as useful as they are unpredictable.

Where a file carries Tanzanian identifiers, LitFin Intelligence checks their structure, and checks that a registration, certificate or licence number has the shape its stated issuer uses.

The result is a finding, not a verdict: this figure does not hold against the rest of the document, at this line. A person can take it up and settle it. LitFin Intelligence draws no conclusion about the applicant from it, and a person makes the decision.

The ledger

The pages it could not read are named.

Every read states what kind of read it was. A file not read whole says so in a ledger of what could not be read.

A document not reached within the time allowed and a document that is genuinely unreadable are different facts. Reporting the second when the first is true sends an officer looking for another copy of a file that was fine.

A partial read reports which page ranges were not read, how many items were missed, of what kind and why. The reason is always specific; none of them is simply that an error occurred.

An appraisal built on nine of forty pages can be sound. One that presents itself as built on forty is not.

The ledger is the claim: it states what was read, so an officer can act on it.

Language

A bilingual file is read as it arrives.

A Tanzanian agricultural file is often bilingual: an English facility letter, a Swahili group resolution, a handwritten delivery note. Nothing asks an institution to normalise a file into one language before sending it.

A passage that cannot be resolved goes into the ledger by page range and cause, like any other unread page.