A desk built around one habit: check the source.

Our story

Reading budgets so the numbers hold up

Altrena began as a small research effort inside a civic newsroom in Uyo, built to answer one recurring question: does the money allocated on paper match what gets reported spent. That question is harder to answer than it sounds, and it took years of reading appropriation acts and gazette notices to build a process worth trusting.

Today the desk covers federal, state, and local budgets, with a standing habit of linking every figure to the document it was taken from. When a figure is later revised, we note it rather than quietly update it.

We are not an audit body and we do not claim wrongdoing. Our task is narrower and, we think, more useful: make the published record easier to read and easier to check.