How We Verify Our Guides

Every Gabay guide is built from official government sources, checked by a human editor, and dated so you always know how current it is.

Official sources only

Gabay guides are built from primary, official government sources. When a fact about a process comes from anywhere else, we treat it as unverified until we can confirm it on the responsible agency’s own portal. The official portals we rely on include:

• NBI Clearance — clearance.nbi.gov.ph
• Social Security System — sss.gov.ph
• Pag-IBIG Fund (HDMF) — pagibigfund.gov.ph
• PhilHealth — philhealth.gov.ph
• PhilSys (national ID) — philsys.gov.ph
• Philippine Statistics Authority — psa.gov.ph
• Bureau of Internal Revenue — bir.gov.ph
• DFA passport services — passport.gov.ph

We always point you back to these official sites to start or complete a transaction. We never place ourselves between you and the agency.

Our verification process

Before a guide is published, we work through a consistent process:

• We identify the responsible agency and locate the relevant page, form, or advisory on its official portal.
• We confirm each requirement, step, and document against that source.
• We note the date we checked, so the guide carries a clear “as of” reference.
• We remove or flag anything we cannot confirm from an official source.

How we handle fees and dates

Government fees and schedules change without much notice. Wherever we mention a fee, a processing time, or a deadline, we describe it as accurate as of the year stated and tell you to confirm the current amount on the official portal before you pay. We would rather you double-check a fee than trust a number that quietly went stale.

Keeping guides current

Each guide is dated, and we schedule reviews for the topics that change most often. When an agency updates a form, a fee, or a procedure, we revise the affected guide and refresh its date. Dating is not a formality for us; it is how you judge whether a guide can still be trusted today.

AI-assisted, human-reviewed

We are transparent about our workflow. We use AI tools to help draft and structure some content, but every guide is reviewed by a human editor against official sources before it is published. AI never has the final word on a fact. A person is responsible for what appears on the page, and that person’s job is to catch errors, remove guesswork, and make sure the guide matches the official process.

If we cannot verify it, we leave it out

When a claim cannot be confirmed from an official source, we do not publish it as fact. We either omit it or clearly mark it as uncertain and direct you to the agency. It is better to tell you “check with the agency” than to fill a gap with a confident guess.

Scam and fixer warnings

Verification is also about safety. Our guides flag common fixer and phishing tactics so you can recognise them: unofficial sites that mimic government portals, “agents” who offer to process your application for a fee, and messages that ask for your OTP, password, or ID number. No legitimate agency will ask you to hand those over to a third party, and neither will we.

Corrections workflow

If you find an error, email us through our contact page with the guide title and what looks wrong. We check the claim against the official source, correct the guide if needed, and update its date. Reader reports are one of the most reliable ways we catch changes quickly, and we take them seriously. You can also read about our independence and funding on the About Gabay page.