Every page on DivAtlas carries the date its sources were last checked, shown at the foot of the page. This page is what that checking involves: the sources, the order they are read in, the routine that keeps them current, and what happens when I get one wrong.
Primary sources, in a fixed order
For the US side of a rule, the reading order follows legal force: the treaty text first, then the Internal Revenue Code, its regulations, and the annual revenue procedures. The IRS tax treaty tables are the index I use to find and cross-check those documents, not an authority above them. When two official sources disagree, the document with legal force wins. For the home-country side of a country page, it is the statute, its implementation rules, and the tax authority’s own announcements. The China page, for example, rests on the US–China treaty, China’s Individual Income Tax Law, its Implementation Rules, and MOF/STA Announcement No. 3 of 2020, and says so at the top of the page.
What never counts as a source: other blogs, aggregator tables, forum posts, and AI summaries. If a rate cannot be traced to a primary document, it does not go on the site.
Re-verified on publish day, not just researched once
Research happens weeks before publication, and tax text does not care about my calendar. So every page is checked against its sources again on the day it goes live. The China page was re-verified against four sources on its publish morning: the treaty, the statute, the implementation rules, and the announcement. If any of them had moved, the page would not have shipped. Where a source was verified within the past two weeks, the publish-day pass confirms it has not moved rather than re-reading it end to end, usually by its last-reviewed date and the revision line on the document itself.
After publication, pages are re-reviewed once a year, and sooner when a source moves. The IRS publishes its inflation-adjusted figures each autumn, and that publication triggers a first pass over the pages that carry those figures; the full annual round covers every page in the first weeks of the year, once those figures have taken effect. Treaty changes, IRS page reorganizations, and new statutes each trigger an off-cycle check of every page they touch.
One data file, every rate traceable
Every dividend withholding rate in the treaty rate atlas lives in a single data file, and every page that shows a treaty rate is generated from that file. One correction reaches every page at once, and no page can quietly drift from the others. The estate tax treaty list is kept separate on purpose: estate and gift tax treaties are different documents from income tax treaties, with different member countries, so that list is checked against its own IRS page.
Each rate names the edition of the IRS table behind it, and the file is spot-checked against that table country by country. Treaty membership is a second check, against the IRS list of treaties in force, and that list does change. Hungary’s treaty has been formally terminated, and it stopped applying to dividends at source on January 1, 2024. The IRS list now carries a termination caution against it, so the atlas shows Hungary as a terminated-treaty row at 30%.
The calculators are tested, not just built
Each calculator is checked against worked examples computed from the underlying documents, and a fixed set of test cases must reproduce the same outputs, digit for digit, before any change ships. The math you see on a page is the math that passed the tests.
When sources conflict, the binding one wins
It happens. As of the verification date at the foot of this page, an IRS FAQ page still shows the prior year’s figure for gifts to a non-citizen spouse, though the revenue procedure setting the new one was published in October 2025. The revenue procedure is the binding document, so that is the number the gift tax article uses, and the article says plainly that the FAQ is behind. Official does not mean current. When two official sources disagree, the page shows the conflict and follows the one with legal force.
What “verified” does not mean
Verified means the rate or rule exists in the cited document and was copied correctly on the date shown. It does not mean you qualify for the rate. Treaty eligibility has its own tests, and the IRS table says as much in its own caution. It does not mean the rate will be the same next year. And it never means the page knows your situation. The China page’s math is right for the facts it states; your facts are yours.
Corrections
If you spot an error, email contact@divatlas.com. Every report gets a reply, normally the same day. If the report holds up, the fix and a log entry follow; if it does not, you get the citation that says why. The reader who catches an error is doing the site’s most valuable work.
The log so far. September 2026: the estate tax exposure checker listed Norway among the countries whose estates get treaty relief. Norway’s estate treaty with the US is no longer in force, and the IRS list of estate and gift tax treaties no longer includes it; the entry was removed and the full list re-verified against that IRS list. Anyone who ran the checker for Norway before the fix would have seen a treaty result that does not apply. A short log is the goal here. A long one would mean the process above is failing.
Who is behind this, and what I am not
DivAtlas is a one-person project. I am not your tax adviser, and nothing on this site is tax, legal, or investment advice; it is reference material with its homework shown. For who runs the site and how it makes money, see About. Anyone can publish a table. This page exists so you can check how the table was made.
Last reviewed: September 2, 2026, when the sources and links on this page were checked again. This page is reviewed annually, or sooner if the process it describes changes.