Our mistakes
We aim to be as transparent as possible, and that includes our own errors. This page is inspired by GiveWell's mistakes page. It lists the mistakes we have made since April 2026 that affect how you should judge GiveRadar's data or integrity assessments, and what we changed so they do not happen again. We do not name the charities involved. Changes to the scoring method itself are listed under How this scoring system has changed.
If you find a mistake we have not listed, tell us at info@giveradar.com.
November 2026: Up-to-date filers marked down
What went wrong. Data Recency lowered a score once a charity's newest financial year was more than six months old. From July each year, charities that had already filed the newest report that could exist lost points.
What we changed. On 4 November 2026 Data Recency started comparing a charity's newest financial year with the newest report it could already have filed, given its country's filing deadline and publication delay. A test run before the change estimated that about 950,000 charities would gain 5 to 10 points and none would lose any.
October 2026: Charities scored as having no official source
What went wrong. Our list of official registers missed about 55 register sources that our own imports use. An estimated 470,000 charities (from a 10% sample) were scored as having no official source and lost up to half of their Financial Transparency and Governance points. About 62,000 outdated "bare minimum" flags also stayed on profiles.
What we changed. On 14 October 2026 we added the missing sources, recalculated the scores and removed the outdated flags. Flags are now brought up to date on every recalculation, and an automated test fails if a source is not classified.
October 2026: US executive pay shown next to the wrong person
What went wrong. On 98,430 of 170,181 US charities that show an executive's name and pay, the name was paired with another person's pay.
What we changed. On 21 October 2026 we rebuilt US officer records from the filings, so each name carries its own pay.
June 2026: US spending ratios built from different years
What went wrong. About 355,000 US charities showed program-spending ratios that combined figures from different filing years. About 59,000 showed "100% to programs" based on a short form that does not report that split.
What we changed. On 30 June 2026 we rebuilt the US financial summaries from each charity's latest IRS filing. The repair now runs every month.
June 2026: Sanctions-match red flags on charities with common names
What went wrong. A screening step compared charity names with international sanctions and politically exposed persons lists. Charities with common names were matched to ships, people and companies that shared the name, and a sample check found that almost every match was false. 5,211 charities carried the flag. It was never visible to anyone.
What we changed. On 12 June 2026 we removed the flag and cleared every instance. A sanctions result will only return if it comes from official government lists, matches organizations rather than names alone, and passes human review.
June 2026: Machine-translated charity names
What went wrong. Machine translation replaced 98,900 Japanese and Korean charity names, some with nonsense: 1,831 Japanese charities were shown under the same meaningless English sentence.
What we changed. On 12 June 2026 we restored every original name. Charity names are never machine-translated.
May 2026: Red flags for things charities do not control
What went wrong. Red flags penalized revenue swings, negative news coverage and spikes in news attention. A stale-filings flag fired after three years, even when the delay was in our own imports. A charity showed us it had been flagged for a one-time grant and for a filing we had not yet imported.
What we changed. On 28 May 2026 we removed those three flags and raised the stale-filings threshold to five years. Every red flag now has to pass one test: is this something the charity controls?
Smaller issues
November 2026: Australian revenue figures
We used gross income instead of total revenue for Australian charities. Gross income includes gains and losses, which made 1,081 revenues for 2024 too small and 98 negative. We re-imported all years from 2020 using total revenue and withheld 60 figures that were clearly wrong.
November 2026: UK total assets and filing dates
Total assets for charities in England and Wales showed net assets instead of gross, and filing period dates were missing. We corrected 454,930 filing years, added 69,251 more and recalculated 7,181 scores.
October 2026: Hidden officers returned by the API
Charity owners can hide officers on their profile. Our API still returned officers an owner had hidden. It now respects the owner's choice.
October 2026: Figures counted as revenue that were not revenue
Lobbying spend and grant totals for 5,508 German organizations, and registered capital for 782 Brazilian organizations, earned revenue credit. They are no longer counted as revenue.
October 2026: Invented Austrian register numbers
332 Austrian profiles showed a made-up register number as if it were a government ID. We removed them.
October 2026: Unrelated news on profiles
Our news matcher linked articles about other organizations to some profiles. News is now shown only with proof that the article is about that charity. News never affected scores.
October 2026: Embedded badges blocked
Integrity badges on charities' own websites counted toward our daily page limit, so some visitors saw an error instead of the badge. Badges no longer count toward the limit.
August 2026: Japanese charities flagged for stale filings
The stale-filings flag fired on 648 of the 1,337 Japanese organizations that disclose finances, because the national portal keeps only one snapshot per organization. We stopped applying the flag to registers that publish only snapshots.
August 2026: Thai profiles unreachable
46,752 Thai profiles returned "page not found" because their web addresses use Thai script, and Thai-script search failed. Both now work.
August 2026: Addresses missing their city
1,091,815 addresses in 27 countries were shown without their city or town, partly because new imports undid earlier fixes. We restored them and added a weekly check.
July 2026: Outdated flags on Jersey charities
All 478 charities in Jersey carried an outdated "bare minimum" flag that cost 2 points. We removed it.
June 2026: Charities sharing a web address
53,095 charities shared a profile address with another charity. Every charity now has its own address, with redirects from the old ones.
May 2026: Inflated Data Recency scores
A software error made Data Recency use the wrong date for every charity, which could inflate scores by up to 15 points. We fixed it on 28 May 2026.