The department has told Parliament that it does not keep figures on how many estates are open at each Master's office, or for how long. So where do these numbers come from? From a public record anyone can read: the Government Gazette. Here is how, step by step.
1. Every Friday, the government publishes the Gazette. When someone dies and their estate is wound up, the law says two things must be announced in it: a notice calling on anyone owed money (the notice to creditors), and later a notice that the estate's account is ready to be checked (some estates have more than one). The Gazette is published online every week, and has been for decades.2. We collect the issues since 2012. More than 7,000 issues, each saved exactly as the government published it, with a fingerprint that proves it has not changed since. The few weeks missing are listed on Trust and integrity.3. We find each notice on the page. An issue holds thousands of notices printed one after another. A computer program, written for these pages, finds where each notice starts and ends. So far that is more than 1.3 million notices.4. We split each notice into its parts. Each kind of notice follows a set form, though its layout has changed over the years. The notice to creditors gives the estate number, the deceased, the date of death and the executor, and since 2021 usually the Master's office; the account gives the estate number, the deceased, the Master's office and the executor, but not the date of death. We pull each part out into its own labelled box, so notices can be counted and compared.5. We join up each estate's notices. The notice to creditors and the account for the same estate appear months apart. We match them by the estate number and the person, so each estate becomes one story with two dates.6. We check everything, and say what we find. Before any number is shown it is checked: for weeks of the Gazette missing, for estates that seem to finish before they started, for totals that do not add up. What fails is either fixed or listed publicly with its reason.7. Then we count, and show our working. How many days lie between an estate's two notices, office by office and year by year. Every chart shows where its numbers came from, and the numbers themselves can be downloaded and checked by anyone.