Vet a supplier before you sign

The supplier risk deck lands the afternoon before the sourcing committee meets. There's a slide per supplier, each with three or four bullets about fines, settlements, recalls and acquisitions, and every bullet reads like a fact. Somebody built it fast, maybe with a chatbot's help, and nobody has time to click through every claim. This page shows how to check those bullets against the regulators' own announcements before they shape a decision, using a real deck where 7 of 12 claims needed attention.

Why supplier facts need a second look now

Supplier status changes faster than decks get updated. On July 31, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security added 43 companies to the UFLPA Entity List, bringing it to 187 entities, a 30% increase and the largest single expansion of the list so far. From August 3, US Customs and Border Protection applies the law's rebuttable presumption to goods from the newly listed companies. A risk summary written in the spring can be out of date by the time the contract is signed.

Teams also have less time to check. The Hackett Group's 2026 Procurement Key Issues study projects procurement workloads rising 8% this year while head count and operating budgets decline. When each analyst covers more suppliers, the bullet nobody traced is the one that reaches the committee.

How CiteJury checks a supplier file

Upload the deck, memo or due-diligence report as a PDF, Word (.docx) or PowerPoint (.pptx) file up to 20 MB, or paste the text. CiteJury finds every checkable claim. You pick the ones that matter, up to 25, and can reword any that are vague before they're checked.

Each claim then gets a full check. CiteJury searches several independent search indexes and favors primary sources: regulators, court records, filings, government pages and wire reports. It searches for evidence against the claim as well as for it. The best passages are sealed into one evidence pack, and Claude, ChatGPT and Grok each read it and answer separately, without searching the web themselves. Every quote they cite is checked word for word against its source, and a final review writes the verdict: Correct, Incorrect, Sources disagree or Can't confirm.

You get one report for the whole document. The Claims tab lists each claim with its verdict, a one-line headline and a suggested fix you can copy. The Document tab shows the text with each claim highlighted in its verdict color. You can download the report as Excel for the supplier file. For a single question, such as whether a supplier has been fined by the EPA since 2020, you can run a check on its own without a document.

Here is the real report, showing two of its supplier slides.

What a 12-claim deck turned up

The file was a PowerPoint called "USDA Risk Assessment Sprint", with risk analysis slides on suppliers including Trident Seafoods and Blue Harvest Fisheries. Twelve claims were checked. Five were Correct, four were Incorrect and three came back Sources disagree, so 7 of 12 needed attention before anyone should rely on the deck.

Slide 5 covered Trident Seafoods. The first bullet, that Trident recalled frozen fish over potential plastic contamination, held up. The second said Trident settled with the EPA for around $3 million under the Clean Air Act. The EPA's own announcement gives a $900,000 civil penalty plus a commitment to spend up to $23 million on fixes. So "around $3 million" was wrong in both directions: too high for the penalty and far too low for the total commitment. The suggested fix reads: "Trident settled Clean Air Act claims with the EPA, paying a $900,000 penalty and agreeing to spend up to $23 million on refrigerant fixes."

The third bullet said Washington fined Trident $25,000 for oil spill negligence that led to a fire. The amount was right and the story was backwards. According to the state's Department of Ecology, a fire damaged a crane's hydraulic hoses, and that spilled the oil. Someone reading the deck would come away thinking a spill caused a fire, which is a different kind of operational risk. The fix: "Washington's Department of Ecology fined Trident $25,000 after a fire ruptured hoses and spilled oil."

Slide 6 covered Blue Harvest Fisheries. The claim that Blue Harvest acquired Hygrade Ocean Products was Correct. The claim that it acquired High Liner Foods was not: it bought High Liner Foods' scallop business and its New Bedford processing plant, not the company. In a risk view, buying a company and buying one of its business lines are very different exposures. The claim that USDA awarded nearly $29 million to Blue Harvest and two other firms came back Sources disagree, so treat it as unconfirmed until you've read the award notice yourself.

Here is the EPA claim from slide 5, checked end to end.

The search turned up 78 results, led by the EPA's and the Justice Department's own pages, and 12 sources went into the sealed pack. Claude, ChatGPT and Grok each read it separately and all three called the claim Incorrect. The parts show how narrow the error was: the settlement, the Clean Air Act and the refrigerant fixes all held up, and only the amount failed. That's the useful part for a committee. The supplier did settle with the EPA. The deck just got the money wrong.

How to vet a supplier deck

1. Upload the file or paste the supplier section. PDF, Word or PowerPoint up to 20 MB. Reading it costs about 1 credit.
2. Pick the claims that would change a decision. Fines, settlements, recalls, list designations, acquisitions, certifications and capacity. Skip the adjectives.
3. Reword vague bullets before checking. "Has had environmental issues" can't be checked. "Paid an EPA penalty in 2019" can.
4. Choose the tier. Each claim you pick is one check. Standard, about 8 credits a claim, suits most decks. Use Deep for a supplier with little coverage, since the AIs also run their own searches while sources are gathered.
5. Read Incorrect and Sources disagree first. Copy the suggested fixes into the deck.
6. Open the regulator or court source behind every claim that stays. The committee should see the primary source, not a summary of it.
7. File the evidence. Download the Excel report into the supplier record, and share links to the checks with the committee.

A supplier-risk analyst's checklist

• Name the regulator, the year and the amount. A claim with all three can be checked. A claim with none is an impression.
• Keep penalties and commitments apart. Settlements often pair a modest penalty with a large spend on fixes. Report both, labeled.
• Check the direction of cause and effect. "A spill that caused a fire" and "a fire that caused a spill" describe different failures.
• Get the entity right. Parent, subsidiary and business unit are different counterparties. So are "acquired the company" and "acquired its scallop business".
• Verify certifications with the certifier. A badge on a supplier's site is a claim. The issuing body's registry is the evidence.
• Check lists again on the day you decide. Entity lists and sanctions lists change, as the July 2026 UFLPA update showed.
• Date every bullet. "Fined in 2023" ages well. "Recently fined" doesn't.

What it won't do

It isn't legal advice, a sanctions screening service or a compliance certification. Use it to check what a document says against public sources, then run formal screening through the tools and lists your policy requires.

It can't read court dockets, subscription databases or registries behind a login, and some sites block automated access. Each result lists the pages it couldn't open. Scanned PDFs without a text layer can't be read, since there's no OCR, and that rules out many older inspection reports. It checks text, not charts or images, so a slide that shows fines as a bar chart won't be checked.

It checks the claims in front of it. It won't tell you what the deck left out, so for recent news about a supplier, ask a separate question or research the supplier as a topic. Very recent events may have little coverage yet, which often means Can't confirm.

A supplier decision is only as good as the facts on the slide. Checking twelve bullets took one upload and turned up four errors and three open questions, each with a source to show the committee. To find alternates when a supplier doesn't pass, see finding suppliers you can verify. For any other report or memo, fact-check the document before it goes out, and to weigh two finalists, compare them side by side.

Questions people ask