Editorial standards

What Nepal Context is

An independent publication that explains how business, investment and regulation work in Nepal. It exists because the practical information in this field is either locked inside professional firms or scattered across unattributed web pages, and because a reader making a commercial decision about Nepal deserves to see where a claim came from.

It is not a government promotional site, a law firm's content marketing, an investment broker, a lobbying vehicle, or a tourism portal. We do not use the words independent, authoritative or leading as claims about ourselves; they are either demonstrated by the work or they are not true.

Four rules that shape everything else

1. Every material claim is traceable. Legal, regulatory, statistical, fee-related and procedural claims each trace to a recorded source with an issuing body and a date. We never create a citation we have not opened and read.
2. Law, practice and interpretation are different things. A statutory requirement, an administrative practice at a particular department, a market convention and our own reading are set apart visually and in the page's structured data. We do not blend them into one confident paragraph.
3. We publish uncertainty rather than hide it. Where sources conflict we show both. Where something is unsettled we say so. Where we could not confirm something at primary level, the page carries a verification required flag instead of a plausible sentence.
4. We take no commercial side. No referral fees, no sponsored guides, no service-provider directory, no paid placement, no advocacy for or against any policy. Our funding is stated on the About page, so that any change to it is visible rather than quiet.

Status labels

In Nepal, the most common published error in business writing is treating a bill as though it were law. A great deal of the reform Nepal is known for is still mid-passage. Every legal instrument we name therefore carries one of these labels, and there are no exceptions:

• In force — enacted and currently effective.
• Enacted, not commenced — passed and authenticated, but not yet in effect.
• Bill — before parliament. Not law.
• Draft — published for consultation. Not law.
• Repealed — no longer in force, retained where the history matters.

House conventions

• Dates. Gregorian first, Bikram Sambat in parentheses on first mention of a Nepali statute or fiscal year — Income Tax Act 2058 (2002), FY 2083/84 (2026/27). BS and AD confusion is the most frequent factual error in this subject and this convention exists to prevent it.
• Currency. NPR as the primary unit, with a USD conversion in parentheses and the conversion date stated.
• Numbers. Million and billion in body text. Lakh and crore only when quoting a source, with the international equivalent alongside.
• Institutions. Full statutory English name at first mention, then the abbreviation the institution itself uses. Several Nepali bodies render their own names inconsistently in English; our style sheet fixes one form for each.
• Translation. Many Nepali instruments exist only in Nepali, and available English versions are frequently unofficial. We label unofficial translations as such. Where an English and a Nepali text diverge, the Nepali text governs and we say so.

Review before publication

Nothing publishes without passing all five:

1. Editorial review — structure, voice, search-intent overlap, internal links.
2. Fact check — every claim against its recorded source, by someone other than the writer.
3. Expert review where flagged — a Nepal-qualified lawyer, tax adviser, auditor, banker or sector specialist. Until named reviewers are published, the reviewer's role is recorded on the page.
4. Status audit — every instrument's in-force status re-confirmed on the day of publication.
5. Disclaimer check — the general-information notice present on every substantive guide.

After publication

• Scheduled re-verification on each page's own cycle, recorded whether or not anything changed.
• Event-driven review when a cited instrument is amended. Our source register records which pages rely on which instrument, so an amendment produces a precise work list rather than a corpus-wide audit.
• An annual budget sweep. Nepal's Finance Act changes tax rates, thresholds and many statutory fees every year. It touches most of our tax cluster at once, and we schedule for that.
• Public corrections. Substantive corrections are logged, dated and permanent, with the previous position stated. See the corrections log.
• Superseded analysis is retained with a dated notice rather than deleted.

On the use of AI

We use language models for research assistance, drafting support and structural work, in the same way a newsroom uses a research desk. We do not treat model output as a source. A model cannot satisfy the traceability rule above, and nothing reaches publication on the strength of it. Every claim is checked by a person against a named document.

This matters here more than in most fields. A large cluster of law-firm-shaped domains covering Nepali business law now publishes near-identical, unattributed, apparently machine-generated content. Our tier-six sourcing is restricted specifically because of it — see how we verify.

What we do not do

• Personalised legal, tax, financial or investment advice.
• Investment recommendations, or any guaranteed-return or projected-return language.
• Invented expert quotations, invented authors, or invented credentials. Until named contributors exist, everything is bylined Nepal Context Editorial Desk.
• Near-duplicate pages, location doorway pages, or manufactured FAQ blocks written to win a search feature.
• Copying government or professional-firm language.
• Publishing a page before it can be sourced, on the theory that it can be improved later.

Telling us we got it wrong

Corrections are welcome and are the fastest way to improve the corpus, particularly from practitioners and from the institutions we write about. Write to us through the contact page. If you can point to the primary source, we will act on it quickly; if you tell us we are wrong without one, we will go and look ourselves.