Methodology
How the law gets into this software
Written from primary sources and checked against them. As of 2026-09-06. How that is done.
Short answer
How does Bloom verify what the law says?
A fact is read out of the state's own statute or administrative code, recorded with that source, its citation and the date it was read, and published only if the source actually says it. A fact that fails is left unpublished and the gap is shown. Published facts are never edited: a change supersedes the old row and both stay, so a decision made last quarter can still be explained with the rule as it stood.
The four states a fact can be in
Proposed means recorded with a source but not yet checked against it. Nothing proposed is enforced or shown as fact. Published means somebody opened the source, read the provision and confirmed it says what the row says, including the numbers, the units, the window and the scope. Superseded means a newer row replaced it and both are kept. Retracted means it was published and should not have been, which is recorded rather than deleted.
What a read actually involves
Fetching the provision the row cites and reading it. Confirming it is the version in force now rather than a superseded one, which for administrative codes usually means checking the filing date. Checking the arithmetic: a rate, a window, a unit and a scope can each be individually plausible and wrong together. And checking the shape, because the difference between two independent allowances and one shared ceiling with a carve out is the difference between a lawful sale and an unlawful one that looks fine.
What this method has caught
Reading thirteen states surfaced faults that a single state had hidden. Purchase limits recorded as what a person may possess rather than what a shop may sell, which means no limit is enforced at all. Trading hours recorded as the closed window rather than the open one, which blocks the lawful day and permits every overnight sale. Tax rows flagged as stacking inside a sales tax base in states whose statute expressly excludes them. A shared allowance recorded as separate category caps, which permits roughly three times the lawful amount.
None of those are exotic. They are what happens when a number is copied without the sentence around it, which is the ordinary way regulatory data goes wrong.
This is not legal advice
It is compliance software and sourced reference information. Every fact carries its source so you can check it, which is the point. The licensee remains responsible for what is reported to the state.
Questions people ask next
- What counts as a source?
- A state's own statute or administrative code, or the agency's own published page. Not a law firm alert, not a trade publication, not another vendor's summary. Those can point at something worth reading; they are never the thing recorded.
- What happens to a fact that fails verification?
- It stays unpublished and the state page shows the gap. It is not corrected quietly, because a correction that nobody wrote down is indistinguishable from an invention. Of the facts read so far, roughly one in five failed and is unpublished.
- How do you know a fact is still true?
- Each published fact carries the date its source was last verified. Bloom watches for regulatory change: proposed rules, agency notices, board agendas and bills. A fact stays live until a real change replaces it, and the replacement is tracked before its effective date and goes live in the system the day it takes effect, with a heads-up to that state's shops beforehand.
- Who decides what gets published?
- Low risk refreshes such as a bill's status or a re-verification date publish automatically with the source attached. Anything that would change a legal status, a purchase limit, a tax rate, a track and trace vendor or a blocking rule waits for a person to approve it.
- What is not enforced yet, and where?
- Twenty nine published rules across thirteen states cannot be evaluated by the engine and are counted as enforcement gaps, twenty of them in Washington where the condition authoring is incomplete. Local tax rows in nine states are attached to the state rather than to a locality, so they never apply. Both are listed here rather than left for someone to discover.