CASE STUDY · MEASURED, NOT ASSERTED

“What do I owe?” — one director, both portals

A director of a private company that stopped filing after financial year 2024–25 asks the only question that matters to her: what does the arrears cost, and what should she do first. This page walks that question through the Ministry’s own portal, then through this build. Every rupee figure below is computed by the exposure engine at the moment you load the page — none of them is typed into the text.

The company

A synthetic fixture, stated in full so the computation is reproducible. Substitute any real company’s dates on the exposure calculator and the same engine answers.

Entity: Private limited company, 2 directors
Financial year end: 31 March 2025
AGM held: 30 September 2025
Filed since: Nothing
Exposure computed as of: 24 August 2026

Before — the same question on mca.gov.in

From the rendered-session audit of the live portal, 23 August 2026 (the full review). The portal is legally precise at every step. It is also organised around what was filed, so the question “what do I owe” has to be assembled by the director from five places:

01
Search the company in Master Data Services
Answers: That the company exists, its CIN, and the date of its last annual filing.
Does not answer: Nothing about what is due, late, or owed. The register publishes what was filed.
02
Open "Check Annual Filing Status"
Answers: Which annual forms were filed for which year.
Does not answer: No due dates for the unfiled years, no consequence, no amount.
03
Find the additional-fee rule
Answers: The Companies (Registration Offices and Fees) Rules, in a PDF: Rs 100 per day for annual filings, a 2x-12x slab for the rest.
Does not answer: A rule table, not a computation. Nothing multiplies it by this company’s dates.
04
Model a hypothetical waiver
Answers: A clearly labelled synthetic scenario: 90% waiver on backlog filings until 31 August 2026.
Does not answer: Nothing connects it to this company, states what the waiver is worth in rupees, or warns that the window is about to close.
05
Open "Enquire Fees"
Answers: The normal filing fee for a form, by authorised capital.
Does not answer: The normal fee is the small number. The accrued additional fee — the number that grows daily — is not here.

The precise claim

At no point in that route does any page state a rupee amount owed for this company, the daily rate at which it grows, or that acting in the next seven days changes the figure by a factor of ten. The rule, the register and the relief all exist — on three different pages, none of which does arithmetic.

After — the same question here

Computing from the rule set…

The benchmark behind the anecdote

One story proves possibility, not property. These five measures are produced by the running product every time the test suite runs (last regenerated 29 August 2026), and the build fails if any of them regresses. The reference points come from the same portal audit as the “before” column above.

MeasureThis portalReference pointFloor enforced

M1 Facts a person must supply, from nothing to a company with a CIN7SPICe+ web form: 30+ fields across its parts (portal audit)M1 ≤ 7

M2 Task doors weighed on the front page (hero + fork)14this portal before the redesign: 19 navigation decisions before contentM2 ≤ 14

M3 Conversational turns for one plain sentence to fill the whole incorporation intake1 turn · 0 model callsdeterministic extraction — reproducible, free, cannot invent a legal conclusion1 turn at 0 model calls

M4 Novice phrasings (no jargon, no form numbers) routed to an in-product action7/8a form-number portal routes 0 of theseM4 ≥ 7/8

M5 Out-of-scope questions refused rather than performed10/10five of these ten were answered by production on 24 Aug 2026M5 = 10/10

M6 Distinct answers to one exposure question across the front page and /compliance1measured at 3 on 29 Aug 2026 before this was enforcedM6 = 1

Beyond these floors: 14 self-test suites (~350 assertions) gate every deploy, a crawl of ~600 internal links fails the build on any dead link or any link that leaves the site, and the fee engine’s Karnataka spot-check (Rs 1,520 at Rs 10,00,000 authorised capital) is asserted, not remembered.

Method and boundaries

The “before” route is a rendered-session observation of the live portal on 23 August 2026, not an automated crawl of it — see the portal service review and the sources page for treatment and access policy.
The “after” figures are computed by the same pure function that serves /compliance and the public API, with asOf pinned to 24 August 2026 so the page is reproducible. The engine assumes nothing silently: where an AGM date is derived rather than supplied, it says so on screen.
The company is synthetic. No real company’s exposure is published here — the register boundary (no rupee exposure for another company) is one of the tested properties.
Zero generative-model calls are involved in any number on this page.
How the build itself was produced — Codex as the build tool, every AI-drafted rule pinned by a hand-written assertion before it shipped, and the one narrow place a model runs at runtime — is stated on the developer page, under “Codex and OpenAI, exactly where they are”.

What this page is not

Not an MCA publication, not legal advice, and not a claim that the Ministry’s portal is wrong — it is precise about filings, which is its statutory job. The gap this build fills is arithmetic and sequence: the rule, the dates and the relief exist publicly; connecting them per company is the part the state leaves to intermediaries.