If you looked up Georgia's CPA continuing-education rule this month on the Georgia Secretary of State's rules site, you would have read that 80 hours are required every two years, with 16 of them in accounting and auditing.
That was true until January 1, 2024. It isn't true now. The current rule — published by the Georgia State Board of Accountancy itself — requires at least 50% of the 80 credits in technical fields of study. That's 40 credits, not 16. A CPA who planned a renewal cycle against the old figure would arrive at renewal 24 credits short.
The unsettling part isn't that an old version of a rule exists somewhere. It's where it lives: on an official state-government site, with no banner, no effective-date warning, nothing to signal that the Board had adopted a newer text. Two government sources, both official, disagreeing — and the one that ranks higher in search results is the stale one.
We know because until last week, one of our own Georgia figures was built from that page.
Catching the Georgia problem forced an uncomfortable question: how many of our other citations rested on something other than the current primary text?
So we audited every record on this site that cited a third-party legal mirror — the convenience sites that republish state statutes and rules — instead of the state's own publication. There were 67 of them, across renewal deadlines, CPE requirements, reinstatement rules, and fees. For each one we located the state's actual current source (the legislature's code site, the state's administrative-rules publisher, or the board's own published rule text), verified it serves the real text, and re-checked our published figures against it.
Most figures held up. Thirteen didn't — not always dramatically, but in ways that matter if you're the person paying the fee:
Every correction of this kind gets logged in the record's own verification history, with the exact primary text quoted. If we got something wrong, the fix and the reason are part of the record — not silently overwritten.
Some of our records carried honest-sounding disclosures like "this board's website blocks automated access, so we couldn't re-confirm this figure against it." Disclosure beats silence. But when we re-tested every one of those claims, most were wrong — and wrong in a specific, repeatable way.
A fetch that comes back empty is a blocked source. A fetch that returns a real document that our text extraction then chokes on is not a blocked source — it's our own tooling failing, dressed up as someone else's firewall. Massachusetts's regulations, Utah's CPE FAQ, Nebraska's administrative code: all three were reachable the whole time. Once we separated "they blocked us" from "we fumbled the parse," and read the documents properly, all three confirmed our published figures verbatim — including Massachusetts's rule that "no carryover is permitted from one two-year period to another," word for word from the codified text.
We rebuilt the checking step so those two failure modes can't be conflated again: a source only gets described as blocked if it actually refuses to serve the document, and a parser failure routes to better parsers — and then to a human with a browser — before anything reaches a public caveat. The re-run settled every one of our "couldn't verify" disclosures. Most cleared. The few genuine gaps that remain (Guam's board site has had a broken security certificate for years; the Northern Mariana Islands has no accountancy board website at all) are now stated precisely, because we checked those premises again rather than letting old conclusions ride.
Because the whole value of a site like this is that the numbers are load-bearing. A renewal deadline or an ethics-hour requirement isn't content — it's something a licensee acts on. That means the honest posture isn't "trust us," it's "here's the current primary source, here's the exact text, and here's what we changed when we found we were wrong."
Three durable rules came out of this, and they now run on every build:
None of this makes us infallible. It makes us checkable — which is the only claim worth making about compliance data.
Every figure on this site links to its source. If you find one that doesn't match the current text of the law, tell us — the correction, and the credit, will be public.
General orientation, not a citation. This guide draws on board rules and, where available, this site's own verified dataset — it isn't a primary source in itself. Last checked against those sources: August 14, 2026.
For the current renewal date or CPE figures your state actually enforces, use the state page linked above — it carries a direct link to the board page and codified rule, per our verification standard.