Payout Math · Galewick Climate Systems · 2025 program year
$29,643 of $835,060 approved for payout should never have been approved.
$24,137 was earned under Galewick's own rules and never paid.
Galewick paid 2,460 contractor install bonuses and 240 quarterly distributor rebates in its 2025 program. Payout Math re-derived every one from the published program rules. 303 payout decisions were wrong: 279 on install-bonus claims and 24 on rebate statements. Overpayments and underpayments are counted separately and never netted — a contractor who was underpaid is not made whole by another contractor's overpayment.
$29,643 by the rule each decision broke first
$24,137 by the rule each decision broke first
A decision that breaks several rules is counted once, under the first rule it breaks in a fixed order: eligibility, then evidence, then arithmetic. Bars sum to the totals above. Rules with fewer than 5 decisions are grouped as “Other”. Records as of 2026-02-27; 10 claims still inside the 35-day processing window are not counted. Received dates are business-day intake dates: a claim submitted on a weekend counts as received the next business day.
The claims
Every payout decision that breaks a rule, with the rule, the evidence, and the dollars. Underpayments sit in the same table with the opposite sign. Each line can be checked by hand against the rules.
Loading 303 records…
The program
61.4% of wrong decisions started with something a member submitted. They account for $18,020 of the $53,779 paid wrongly in either direction. The other $35,759 — 66.5% — came from Galewick's own calculations. A member-submitted error averaged $97; a Galewick calculation error averaged $306, and $28,289 of the total sits on 24 distributor rebate statements.
Submitted by members, approved by Galewick
The claim itself broke a rule, and the processor paid it anyway. 186 decisions · $18,020 overpaid · $0 underpaid.
| Rule | What went wrong | Decisions (first rule broken) | Decisions (rule broken at all) | Overpaid | Underpaid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A4.1 | Filed late, paid anyway | 50 | 50 | $5,530 | — |
| A2.1 | Ineligible model | 50 | 50 | $3,670 | — |
| A1.2 | Ineligible contractor | 19 | 19 | $2,385 | — |
| A5 | Missing or mismatched documentation | 19 | 63 | $2,005 | — |
| A3.1 | Install outside program year | 19 | 19 | $1,925 | — |
| A7.2 | Rain-check substitute paid | 19 | 19 | $1,425 | — |
| A6.1 | Duplicate serial, same contractor | 5 | 5 | $645 | — |
| A6.1 | Duplicate serial, two contractors | 5 | 5 | $435 | — |
Calculated by Galewick
The member did nothing wrong; Galewick's own arithmetic or decision was off. 117 decisions · $11,623 overpaid · $24,137 underpaid.
| Rule | What went wrong | Decisions (first rule broken) | Decisions (rule broken at all) | Overpaid | Underpaid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B4.1 | Wrong tier | 5 | 5 | $5,437 | $4,917 |
| B4.2 | Earned tier paid at a lower tier | 5 | 5 | — | $8,276 |
| A9.1 | Valid claim denied or unprocessed | 50 | 50 | — | $5,240 |
| B3.3 | Ineligible SKUs in volume | 5 | 5 | $1,372 | — |
| A2.2 | Wrong bonus amount | 19 | 19 | $595 | $315 |
| A6.2 | Factory serial collision denied as duplicate | 5 | 5 | — | $690 |
| A8.3 | Partial payment with no rule basis | 19 | 19 | — | $630 |
| B3.2 | Returns not netted | 5 | 5 | $539 | — |
| B4, B5.2 | Other (fewer than 5 decisions each) | 4 | 4 | $3,678 | $4,069 |
“First rule broken” counts each decision once and sums to the verdict. “Rule broken at all” is informational: a decision that breaks two rules appears in both rows.
How this was built
Galewick Climate Systems is an invented HVAC manufacturer. Its 2,806 claims and 240 rebate statements are synthetic and generated from a fixed seed. The kinds of error come from nineteen years of incentive-program operations. How often each one occurs follows a stated scale, because no published source breaks claim errors down by type. Each kind of error is seeded at exactly its rate times the number of claims or rebate statements, so the counts repeat by design. Every rule value in the rulebook is a seeded draw from a range with a stated basis, not a number anyone chose.
The validator reads only what Galewick's systems would hold — claims, documents, invoices, credits, statements — and the published rules. It never sees which errors were planted, and it finds every one of them and nothing else.
Within a published range. Share of paid install-bonus claims carrying a defect: 11.3%, against 6–15% reported by ProfitOptics, a rebate-audit vendor, in 2026.
Outside a published range. Overpaid dollars as a share of all dollars approved for payout: 3.5%, against 10–15% reported by a 2013 Zyme press release quoting Forrester on high-tech manufacturers. The error rates were not adjusted to close the gap.