The panel does not ask whether it is true. It asks whether it would move a price.

What the Tribunal decides

A Materiality Determination answers one question: would a reasonable investor consider this significant enough that answering it, or letting it run as drafted, would move the price of the client’s security. It is the same standard securities law already asks a company to apply to itself when deciding what belongs in a filing, run here on an item before it is a filing, by a panel that had no hand in producing it.

The Tribunal does not assess whether a question is fair, whether a story is accurate, or whether the client’s answer, if it gave one, would hold up. Those are separate questions, and this firm is not retained to answer them. A finding that a question clears the materiality threshold does not mean the client must answer it fully or honestly; it means the client’s officers now know they are handling something the rest of Pre-Clearance Review is built around, and can staff, schedule and word the response accordingly.

Composition

A Materiality Determination sits five members; a routine Pre-Clearance escalation sits three. Each member is a separately licensed model, drawn from a different vendor, so that no single provider’s individual tendency toward caution, or its opposite, determines an outcome on its own. A filing requires the concurrence of a majority of the sitting panel; where the panel splits, the finding is graded divided rather than resolved, and is reviewed a second time before it issues. A duty reviewer, a qualified member of the Evidentiary Standards Desk, reads every finding before release and may return a filing to the panel with a tier grading marked unresolved, but does not have authority to reverse a concurring majority. The structure mirrors the three- and five-arbitrator panels standard in commercial arbitration; only the composition of the bench has changed.

The confidence rubric, applied

Every claim behind a question or a draft item of coverage is graded before the panel votes on materiality, using the same tiered scale summarised on the overview page.

A filing built entirely on Tier IV and V sourcing is not thereby found false. It is found insufficiently supported to establish that answering it, or running it, is more than a question about the client’s own account of itself, which is a lower materiality bar than the drafting usually implies.

Sourcing under a confidentiality or protection arrangement

No source is identified to this desk. No credibility determination is made about the individual behind a Tier V claim, and none is required: the Desk grades the claim, not the person making it. Where a claim is later confirmed to have originated with an employee under a whistleblower-protection arrangement, that status changes nothing about the grading already issued, and this firm takes no position on, and no interest in, the protected status itself. The tier a claim receives concerns only what corroborates it at the time of filing. Clients running Meridian Clearing’s Discovery Risk Desk on the same disclosure window will recognise the distinction: one desk prices the timing of a disclosure, this one prices the evidentiary basis, and neither is instructed to know who the source is.

The Desk is asked periodically whether Tier IV could be folded into Tier I to III for high-volume clients, to speed clearance. We do not recommend this: collapsing the tiers would raise the Tribunal’s same-day clearance rate by an estimated eleven percentage points, which is reason enough that a competitor eventually will.

The Discrepancy Notice

A Discrepancy Notice is a dated document, issued to the outlet or analyst behind a forthcoming item, stating that the sourcing supporting a specific claim did not meet the rubric’s threshold at the time of filing. It carries the finding, not an instruction. The recipient did not consent to this arbitration and has no forum in which to contest the finding once it issues; what changes is only that an editor weighing whether to run the item now does so alongside a dated, externally produced document, which most editors have not previously had to weigh against.

• Filed against a specific claim, not against a story as a whole
• Issued only where the underlying finding is unanimous or resolved on review, never on a divided panel
• Delivered with the finding attached in full, not summarised
• Silent on whether the claim is true; it addresses only what corroborates it

Turnaround

A finding issued after an item has already run is still entered on the docket, and is occasionally still requested, but it changes what it can be used for. Full fee schedule and onboarding are set out under Engagement.