Why financial answers need provenance

The failure mode that matters is not a wrong number. It is a right-looking number whose window nobody recorded.

FinanceBench measured a strong model with retrieval answering incorrectly or declining on 81% of a sampled subset of questions its authors call clear-cut 1. Those two outcomes are not the same failure. Declining costs a minute. Answering fluently from the wrong page costs a decision, and it costs it silently.

#The four things a figure has to carry

• The value.
• The period it covers — FY2025 is not the trailing twelve months.
• The document it came from, identified once so that two facts from the same filing point at the same filing.
• The date we read it. It is the only date we observed ourselves.

Drop any one and the sentence still parses. That is precisely the problem: nothing downstream can detect the loss.

#Why the table alone is not enough

TAT-QA exists because in real reports the figure sits in the table and the qualification sits in the paragraph beside it 2. A system that reads only the table produces a number that is arithmetically correct and materially wrong. Provenance that points at the table without the surrounding prose reproduces the same error one layer down.