Questions auditors and operators ask

GOVP proves that a declaration you issued earlier has not been changed since: its integrity (it is byte-for-byte what was signed), its authorship (it carries the issuer's Ed25519 signature), its verifiability (a third party can check it independently, offline), and the detectability of any later alteration. The Generated-At time is asserted by the issuer — making that time independently provable is an optional anchoring layer (RFC 3161 / qualified timestamp), not part of a bare record.

GOVP does not prove that a statement is true, that a measurement is physically accurate, that a rule has automatically been satisfied, or that a process was correctly designed. It establishes that the record is unaltered — not that the record's content reflects reality. This boundary is deliberate, and it is what makes the integrity claim credible.

No. An audit evaluates whether your records are accurate and your processes sound. GOVP makes the records an auditor relies on verifiable and tamper-evident. It strengthens an audit by removing the question of whether evidence was altered after the fact — it does not perform the audit's judgement.

No. A quality system defines how work is done and recorded. GOVP sits underneath it, turning the records that system produces into evidence that can be trusted by parties outside your organization. The two are complementary: your quality system governs the content, GOVP secures its integrity.

Yes. Verification is a pure function of the record and its proof — it requires no server, no call to GOVP, and no connection to the issuer. GOVP Studio verifies fully offline, and the procedure can be reimplemented from the published specification.

Yes — that is the entire purpose. Anyone holding the record and its proof can confirm integrity, and they reach the same result you do without having to trust you. A regulator, an insurer, a customer or a court can all verify the same evidence independently.

Verification does not depend on GOVP as an operator. The format is open and self-describing, and the verification logic is published, so the ability to check a proof never sits in any single party's hands — including ours. GOVP provides the tools; the evidence stands on its own.

Proofs remain verifiable. Because a proof is self-contained and verification needs neither the issuer nor GOVP to be online, evidence fixed today can still be checked years later even if the organization that produced it no longer exists. Integrity is a property of the artifact, not of the company.

The verification procedure is documented and uses standard primitives, so a proof can be checked with independent tools that do not depend on GOVP existing. The format is designed to outlive any single provider, including us.