intel agent published briefing with wrong fiscal year, validation failed

TL;DR

Wrong fiscal years in briefings happen when the agent copies the calendar year off the filing date instead of the company's fiscal calendar. Validate every briefing's fiscal year against the filing's own period-end date before publishing, and keep a per-company fiscal calendar in the pipeline config.

The error

validation failed: briefing claims FY2026 for 10-K with period end 2025-09-30
company fiscal year ends in September; FY2025 is correct.

Fix it

1. Extract the period-end date from the filing itself (10-K cover page or XBRL DocumentPeriodEndDate) instead of trusting the agent's year. Expected: Expected: the filing says 2025-09-30, which maps to FY2025 for a September year-end.

2. Maintain a company fiscal-calendar table (ticker to fiscal year-end month) and have the validator compute the expected fiscal year from the period-end date. Expected: Expected: the validator flags any briefing whose claimed year mismatches the computed one.

3. Fix the briefing template so the agent must cite the period-end date next to every fiscal-year claim. Expected: Expected: future briefings carry the source date, making the year checkable at a glance.

4. Backfill check: re-validate the last 30 days of briefings for fiscal-year mismatches and correct the published ones. Expected: Expected: a list of affected briefings with corrections issued.

When to use

• Your intel agent's briefings fail validation on fiscal year.
• You cover companies with non-December year-ends (Apple, Microsoft).
• You need a validator that catches year errors before publishing.

When not to use

• The company uses calendar-year fiscal - then the agent was right and the validator is wrong.
• The error is about quarters, not years - different validation rule.
• The filing itself is mislabeled - then flag the filing, not the briefing.

Why it happens

Agents default to calendar-year thinking: a 10-K filed in late 2026 'feels like' FY2026. But a September year-end company filing in October 2026 is reporting FY2025. The agent pattern-matches the filing date instead of reading the period-end date, and the error repeats for every non-December filer.

Variant phrasings

ai briefing wrong fiscal year

Same failure and fix; some searchers phrase the query this way.

fiscal year validation failed briefing agent

Same failure and fix; some searchers phrase the query this way.

Edge cases

• 52/53-week fiscal years end on different exact dates each year; match by month, not exact date.
• Companies sometimes change fiscal year-ends; the config table needs the effective date of the change.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_UoNSPAoWQWGhZPdnypBVZw