Verification

Identity

Who signed it. Answered by the signature.

Transparency

Whether it was published somewhere it cannot be quietly changed. Answered by the log.

Coherence

Whether the claim contradicts itself on its own fields. Answered without reference to either of the above.

Coherence is the one most systems skip, and it is the cheapest. A claim that contradicts itself can be rejected before anyone checks a signature, and no amount of valid signing makes an incoherent claim true.

What is checked

No lookahead

A claim made as of a date does not reference anything that came after it. This is the property that stops a backtest, or a decision explanation, quietly using the future.

Monotonic adjustment

An adjusted figure moved in the direction adjustment is allowed to move it.

Payment coherence

The amount sits inside the cap, the payee is on the allowlist, and the authority had not expired at the stated moment.

Settlement finality

Nothing is claimed final while its own reversal window is still open.

It names the same checks the gate does

Three of the identifiers here, the per-payment cap, the scope and the expiry, are the same identifiers the live decision uses. So a coherence failure names the exact predicate that would have refused the payment later. You are not translating between two vocabularies.

{
  coherent:   false,
  violations: ["payee not in allowlist"],
  checks:     [
    { id: "claim_type_known",     passed: true  },
    { id: "per_tx_cap",           passed: true  },
    { id: "mandate_scope",        passed: false },
    { id: "mandate_not_expired",  passed: true  }
  ]
}

All three legs of a payment claim are always evaluated, so the verdict shows every inconsistency rather than stopping at the first. Coherent is exactly equivalent to every check passing and no violations, so the two cannot drift apart.

An unknown claim is a verdict, not a crash

Timestamps fail closed in the same spirit: an unparseable expiry is treated as expired rather than ignored. A claim that is merely not yet final, with its window still open, is perfectly coherent — that is an ordinary pending payment, not a contradiction.