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

Routing

Nineteen formats, routed by what the file is rather than by what it is called.

A file name is a claim, and in the field it is often a wrong one. A photograph saved with a spreadsheet's extension is an ordinary event. A browser that declares every upload as an unknown type is an ordinary event. A message exported from a phone with no extension at all is an ordinary event.

So LitFin decides what a file is by opening it first. Content, then the type the sender declared, then the name, in that order, because all three of those are unreliable and they are unreliable in a known order. A reader that trusts the name hands back an empty document and calls it a read, and nothing downstream can tell that it did.

Nineteen formats are routed this way. A forwarded mail message is treated as a document rather than as a wrapper, so the message body and every attachment inside it are read. An archive is opened and its members are read.

Where a file falls outside what LitFin can route, it is reported as unsupported, by name, and counted. It is never passed over in silence. That is the rule this whole page stands on. A page is never skipped quietly. It is read, or it is named.

Photographed pages

Most of a real credit file was never a document, and that is the normal case.

Much of the evidence in a credit file was printed, signed, stamped and then photographed. There is no text inside a page like that to lift out of it. So the page is read as a page: looked at rather than searched, with character recognition where it is needed, and with the position of the words kept where they sit on the sheet.

Keeping position is what makes everything after it possible.

A stamp recorded in an inventory is not a stamp at its position on page nine. Only the second one can be quoted back, checked against the page it came from, or put in front of a committee that would rather see it than be told about it.

Authenticity

Reading a statement is not the same as believing it.

A document can be complete, legible and wrong. It can also be wrong on purpose. Both are ordinary in lending, and neither is visible to a reader that only lifts the text off the page.

So a statement is tested against itself, and what does not hold is reported. The full set of tests is not published, beyond the structural identifier check below, for the same reason a lender does not publish the checks its own back office runs: the value of a test of this kind is in the asymmetry, and the asymmetry lasts exactly as long as the list does not travel.

Where a file carries Tanzanian identifiers, LitFin checks their structure, and checks that a registration, certificate or licence number has the shape its stated issuer uses. That check is made from the document itself.

What comes back is a finding rather than a verdict. It reads as a plain statement of what did not hold and where, in the form that this figure does not hold against the rest of the document, at this line, which is something a person can take up and settle. LitFin concludes nothing about the applicant from it.

The ledger

The pages it could not read are named.

Every read says what kind of read it was, and a file that was not read whole says so itself, in a ledger of what could not be read.

This matters more than it sounds. A document that could not be reached inside the time allowed and a document that is genuinely unreadable are two different facts about the world. Telling an officer the second when the first is true sends them hunting for another copy of a file that was always fine.

So a partial read reports which page ranges were not read, how many items were missed, of what kind, and why. The reason is always a named reason. Not one of them is that an error occurred.

An appraisal built on nine of forty pages can be a perfectly good appraisal. An appraisal built on nine of forty pages that presents itself as built on forty is not, and no amount of polish on the output changes which of the two you are holding.

This is why LitFin never claims to have read what it did not read. The ledger is the claim, and it is worth more than the absolute that used to stand in its place, because an officer can act on it.

Language

A file that could not be read is a file that could not be read, whatever it is written in.

A Tanzanian credit file is routinely bilingual. An English facility letter over a Swahili board resolution over a delivery note written by hand at a weighbridge. Nothing here asks an institution to normalise a file into one language before sending it.

Where a passage cannot be resolved, it goes into the ledger by page range and cause, like anything else that could not be read. The honest instrument is the same instrument, which is the whole point of having one.