GOV.UK tax and business guidance catalogue

GOV.UK tax and business guidance · Source universe · Research and review

Sterling measured 658 current GOV.UK pages beneath the public Money and tax and Business and self-employed browse roots on 11 September 2026. This is a complete-current discovery boundary, not a claim that every page is reviewed accounting or tax knowledge.

Catalogue membership is discovery evidence. It cannot establish law, an accounting treatment, a calculation or a customer recommendation.

The deployed daily dream accepts a catalogue only after two complete walks agree, retains an immutable manifest and acquires representative or change-implicated pages. Its live counts are read through the same Sterling knowledge interface used by Telegram; this dated public measurement never silently claims operational freshness.

What the stages mean

• Catalogued means GOV.UK returned a stable content identity and selected browse membership.
• Acquired means permitted bytes and retrieval evidence were retained. It does not approve their interpretation.
• Reviewed means a human-reviewed Sterling assertion cites the page with its authority and applicable period explicit.
• Published means reviewed knowledge is safe for this public wiki. Customer facts remain private.

Mainstream Browse and Topic Taxonomy are different

Mainstream Browse is the customer-facing navigation tree rooted at /browse. Topic Taxonomy is a separate, much larger subject graph. The selected browse roots produced 221 tax pages, 474 business pages, and 37 in both, while the analogous topic-taxonomy roots produced 79,107 Search results and still omitted 211 browse members. Sterling preserves both relationship types and never treats one as an alias for the other.

The catalogue uses all 31 live second-level browse pages—eight under Money and tax and 23 under Business and self-employed. It queries the GOV.UK Search API with stable branch identities and preserved slugs, then verifies individual pages through the GOV.UK Content API. Search is unsupported discovery metadata; Content API is the current structured publisher representation and is limited to ten requests per second per client.

Publisher relationships and gaps

GOV.UK exposed 773 Search membership edges, 763 ordered details.groups edges and 226 expanded public child links. The measured reconciliation found 29 Search-only and 19 group-only membership gaps. Sterling records these disagreements explicitly; it does not delete a page, invent a relationship or infer withdrawal to make the projections balance.

Every one of the 658 measured paths returned HTTP 200 with a matching English content identity and canonical path. That result is evidence at the retrieval time, not a permanent guarantee. A later 303 or redirect document means moved; a 410 means gone; a 404 alone cannot prove whether a page was withdrawn. Material changes enter proposal and human review before affecting trusted answers or past customer outcomes.

Authority, history and rights

GOV.UK tax and business guidance is official interpretation, not controlling legislation or an accounting standard. The public APIs expose current editions rather than a complete historic archive, so Sterling builds prospective history from retained snapshots and explicit effective dates.

Most Crown content is reusable under the Open Government Licence v3.0 with attribution. Credited third-party material, personal data, logos and other exclusions require item-level handling. Catalogue membership never grants permission beyond the page's actual rights.

Last checked 11 September 2026. Measured baseline: 658 identities, 31 browse branches, 221 tax memberships, 474 business memberships and 37 overlapping identities.

Catalogue schema: sterling-govuk-guidance-catalogue@1. Source registry: sterling-source-registry@2026-09-11.5.