Gates

Gates are conditions that end the conversation. Unlike factors, they are not averaged into anything — a gate either recommends an outcome, raises a floor, or reports that it could not be read.

The eight gates

Gate	Recommends
Standing bar on acceptance	Reject on a strong identifier, escalate on a name
Blocking screening match	Reject
Commercial registration active	Reject when the registry does not report the registration as active
Prohibited activity	Reject
High-risk activity	Raises the floor to medium
Licence for a regulated activity	Raises the floor to medium
Ownership resolves to people	Escalate when the ownership chain cannot be resolved to natural persons
PEP among the parties	Escalate
Signer is an authorized signatory	Not currently evaluable — Verity does not record who submitted the application, so it cannot be matched against the registered signatories. It needs an applicant identity at intake.

The one gate that can answer from our own data

Standing bar on acceptance reports clear when nothing matches, which every other gate is forbidden to do. That is legitimate here and nowhere else: the list is our own table, we hold all of it, and an entity always carries at least a registration number to match on — so "not on our list" is a fact we can establish rather than an absence dressed up as one.

Every other gate reads evidence a provider supplies, where an empty result means either "we looked and found nothing" or "nobody looked".

Three states

State	Meaning
Triggered	The condition is met. Carries an outcome and a detail.
Clear	It was evaluated, and there is nothing to raise.
Not assessed	It could not be read. This is not clear.

The distinction is the whole point of the gate panel. Opening a review runs no checks, so a gate that reads screening results has nothing to read — and reporting that as clear meant the most decision-critical signal in the file turned green for free. Gates now return not evaluable until the underlying run exists.

Advisory, with two exceptions

Gates recommend an outcome for a human to take. They do not block approval.

Two conditions genuinely block, and both are enforced on the review itself rather than here:

• An unadjudicated blocking sanctions match — see Screening adjudication
• A standing bar on a strong identifier — see Standing bars

A standing bar on a name does not block. Names collide, so it raises this gate for a human to read and nothing more.

Floors

A triggered gate may raise the band floor. It can never lower it. The assessment records that a floor applied and why, and the entity page states both numbers: computed low, raised to medium because …. A raised band is never presented as if the factors produced it.

A floor also survives the evidence threshold: when the factors are too thin to band, a gate floor still stands, because a PEP match or a prohibited activity is evidence in its own right.

Reading the panel

Gates that were actually read appear in the table. The rest are grouped beneath it under the cause they share, because one unrun check typically blocks several gates with the same sentence:

4 gates could not be read. Not assessed is not the same as clear. No registered activities are on file — run the commercial registration check to load them. Prohibited activity, Licence for a regulated activity, and High-risk activity

The chip beside the section heading reports the recommendation. When nothing triggered but gates are unread, it says N gates unread in slate — not a green "No gate triggered", which would be a green light nobody earned.