Operator ruling 2026-08-20. Severity no longer sets the review interval.
A check that comes back clean climbs one rung — instant, 1h, 8h, 24h,
48h, 96h, 7d, 14d, 1mo, 1q — and anything wrong drops straight back to
instant. A quarter is the ceiling. The operator may defer an instant
finding to a stated date; that is the only other way off the bottom rung.
The rung is the point: it says how stable the estate has been on that
matter, which is information severity does not carry. Volatile things get
attention automatically; quiet things stop consuming it; neither
judgement has to be made by a person who might be busy.
Escalation trigger 5 rebased onto the ladder — fourteen days at the
bottom rung, whether that is failing checks or no checks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>