Policy-based decision benchmarks evaluate whether systems apply written rules to financial and operational cases. Yet a rule-following response can be marked wrong when the benchmark misstates the required decision. We audit nine public policy-based decision benchmarks through source tracing, program execution, and controlled checks. We find unsupported targets, reference errors that survive replay or propagate as solved steps, and evaluators that reject acceptable answers or credit incomplete decisions. To measure the scoring impact, we rescore unchanged model responses. On the 96 LegalBench SARA numeric cases, correcting the scorer raises acceptance by more than 80 percentage points for each of three models, without changing references or responses. In RuleArena Tax, restoring a required zero floor changes 27 of 300 references and narrows an observed model gap. A controlled federal-exemption task with explicit ownership and eligibility assumptions also shows that errors in supplied intermediate answers can affect final decisions. We present BAR (Benchmark Audit and Revision), a versioned collection of audit evidence and revisions for reevaluation.
Search can help LLM agents correct mistakes, but their starting conditions may shape which evidence they find and use. Drawing on cognitive-bias paradigms, we develop a controlled search harness to examine result order, records of prior work, and initial hypotheses while holding each question and document collection fixed. Matched controls distinguish order effects from differences in document composition and the effects of failed work from context length. Across 10 models and 1,000 synthetic search worlds, we track queries, retrieved documents, document openings, and final answers. Our comparisons suggest that final answers are more sensitive to initial evidence order during active search than when all evidence is supplied in full. Dead-end histories can reduce strategy switching relative to matched neutral histories, indicating an effect beyond context length. Under wrong hypotheses, stage measurements distinguish reduced retrieval or opening from errors that persist after counter-evidence is opened. Exploratory interventions show that opening counter-evidence more often can coincide with lower accuracy, while accuracy can improve with little change in opening.