West Virginia standards alignment

• Appendix A, item 8

  Covered

  Develop the knowledge and practices of a savvy consumer who knows consumer rights and responsibilities, can identify and avoid fraudulent practices and guard against identify theft.

  Covered by

  • Credit, and the Decisions Made About You
  • Predatory Products, Priced
  • Taxes, and the Money Taken Before You See It

  • · 17 · The dispute, and the clock it starts
  • · 18 · The furnisher has duties too, and that is the leverage
  • · 19 · Getting your own file, and the site the regulation does not name
  • · 13 · Read your own adverse action notice
  • · 14 · The second notice on the same page
  • · 15 · A gate that has to state a standard
  • · 6 · Who is allowed to look, and the four words that end the list
  • · 18 · Unauthorized is a defined word, and everything depends on it
  • · 19 · What the institution owes you when the definition is met
  • · 20 · When you pressed send, the machine does not start
  • · 21 · The same loss under four different rulebooks
  • · 23 · Three tools in the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and what each one does
  • · 24 · Complaint, order, verdict: three documents that are not the same thing
  • · 25 · Who is targeted, taken from the record rather than asserted
  • · 7 · Two states, opposite answers, and how to find yours
  • · 12 · Where the total hides, and what a regulator found
  • · 26 · Capstone: price one product, check one rule, read one document
  • · 13 · Free File is a contract, and the number in it moves
  • · 14 · The volunteer programs, and the statute behind them
  • · 15 · The government built one itself, and then suspended it
  • · 16 · An examination is a procedure with a clock and a list of rights

  Note: EXTENDED 2026-08-29 WITH MONEY-05 (`taxes-and-filing`), which deepens the consumer-rights-and-responsibilities half rather than changing the coverage, which was already full. A savvy consumer of tax services now gets three additions from the statutes: the ten taxpayer rights enumerated in the United States Code at 26 U.S.C. 7803(a)(3), which the Commissioner is directed to ensure employees act in accord with (among them the right to be informed, the right to challenge the position of the Service and be heard, and the right to retain representation); the free, non-commercial routes to preparation and to representation, which are the Free File public-private partnership, the VITA and TCE volunteer programs whose matching grants sit at 26 U.S.C. 7526A, and the low-income taxpayer clinics at 26 U.S.C. 7526; and the method for checking which of those routes is actually open in a given filing season, taught against a documented case in which one route was built, used by hundreds of thousands of filers and then suspended inside about eighteen months. THE ORIGINAL BASIS FOR THE FULL RATING IS UNCHANGED and is recorded below. FULL as of 2026-08-28, and this entry records the change rather than hiding it: until MONEY-04 shipped it read partial, because the course then said in these words that it taught NOTHING about identifying and avoiding fraudulent practices or guarding against identity theft. Item 8 has three parts and each now has a course behind it. CONSUMER RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES: MONEY-01, from the statutes rather than as general awareness (who may lawfully obtain your file under 15 U.S.C. 1681b, what a refusal must tell you under ECOA and Regulation B, the dispute and reinvestigation right under 1681i, furnisher duties under 1681s-2, the free annual file disclosure under 1681j). IDENTIFY AND AVOID FRAUDULENT PRACTICES: MONEY-04, taught as a rule rather than as a warning list. The load-bearing lesson is the line Regulation E draws at 12 CFR 1005.2(m), under which a transfer taken without the consumer's authority starts an error-resolution procedure with deadlines and the burden of proof on the institution at 15 U.S.C. 1693g(b), while a transfer the consumer was deceived into making themselves does not. Avoidance is taught procedurally (end the call, dial the number on your own card; check the lender against the state licensing register) and evidentially (how to read a complaint, a stipulated order and a jury verdict without confusing the three). GUARD AGAINST IDENTITY THEFT: MONEY-04 again, from 15 U.S.C. 1681c-1 and 1681c-2, which supply the initial fraud alert, the extended alert, the free security freeze with its one-business-day placement and one-hour lift, and the four-business-day block. What the course still does not do is survey scam TYPES as a taxonomy (phishing, pyramid schemes, skimming, data breaches), because item 8 asks for practices and rights rather than for a catalogue of schemes. (West Virginia's published text reads "identify theft"; the intended term is plainly identity theft, and the typo is the publisher's, transcribed here as printed.)

• Appendix A, item 6

  Partially covered

  Complete federal and state income tax forms and examine other state and local taxes.

  Covered by

  • Taxes, and the Money Taken Before You See It

  • · 1 · The money is taken before you ever see it
  • · 2 · The withholding certificate is the one dial you hold
  • · 3 · A refund is not a gift, and a balance due is not a fine
  • · 18 · Capstone: read your own paperwork, and look one thing up properly
  • · 4 · Who has to file, and who files anyway
  • · 5 · You sign it under penalties of perjury, and that starts two clocks
  • · 6 · Filing status is a legal fact, not a preference

  What we do and don't cover: Partial, and narrowly, so a teacher planning against this item knows before the lesson what they are getting. THE FEDERAL FORM THIS COURSE TEACHES A STUDENT TO READ AND COMPLETE IS THE WITHHOLDING CERTIFICATE, NOT THE RETURN. MONEY-05 works Form W-4 in detail, from the statute that requires it (26 U.S.C. 3402(f)(2)) and the regulation that prescribes it (26 CFR 31.3402(f)(5)-1(a), which also records that the form was previously called the Employee's Withholding Allowance Certificate), including the 3402(n) exemption and its two conditions, and the capstone has the learner read their own. AROUND THE RETURN it teaches what the document legally is rather than how to fill it in: who is required to file under 26 U.S.C. 6012(a)(1)(A) and by when under 6072(a), what the 6065 declaration under penalties of perjury commits, how filing status is determined as a matter of fact on one date under 7703(a) and 2(b)(1), and what joint and several liability under 6013(d)(3) means for each spouse. It also classifies every line of a pay statement by the chapter that imposes it and works gross to net by hand. WHAT IS NOT COVERED, and it is a real gap: the course does NOT walk a Form 1040 line by line, so a student will not have completed a return; it teaches NO state income tax form, since state tax is state law and this catalog covers none of it; and it does not examine other state and local taxes at all, which is the entire second clause of the item. West Virginia's own personal-finance course will need to supply the completion practice and the state and local half; this catalog supplies the machinery underneath them.

What we don't claim

A standards page is only worth reading if the omissions are honest too. We looked at these and left them out:

• Mathematics — nothing. This catalog does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no West Virginia College- and Career-Readiness mathematics standard.
• Science — considered, deferred, not claimed this pass. West Virginia's science standards (WVBE Policy 2520.3C, adopted 2021) are NGSS-derived, so the catalog's one honest science idea — resource availability and climate shaping human activity (the substance of NGSS HS-ESS3-1) — would in principle map to a West Virginia science code. But the West Virginia-hosted and regulatory copies we could retrieve are image-only scans with no extractable, byte-faithful text, and our rule is verbatim-or-nothing. We will not alias the shared NGSS file to a West Virginia code we could not confirm against West Virginia's own printed wording, nor transcribe from a scan we cannot read exactly. Science is deferred until that verbatim text is in hand.
• West Virginia's own state structure is taught more fully than any one Civics standard names. West Virginia Civics teaches the state's singular origin (the only state formed by breaking away from another, its pro-Union western counties splitting from Virginia in 1863) and its Constitution of 1872, the plural executive with no Lieutenant Governor (the Senate President succeeds the Governor) and its weak veto, the 100-Delegate/34-Senator part-time Legislature and its 60-day session, the 2015 switch to nonpartisan judicial elections and the 2022 Intermediate Court of Appeals, the absence of any statewide citizen initiative, and the 55 counties — all from West Virginia's own sources. SS.C.20 (state and local government) and SS.C.13 (state judicial systems) host most of it, but the WVCCRS Civics standards are U.S.-system concept statements, not a West-Virginia-government checklist, so West Virginia's origin story, its plural executive, and its recent court changes have no code of their own.
• The Civics standards on parties, interest groups, and world affairs. Standards the catalog's civics does not genuinely teach are not claimed: SS.C.4 (collaboratively build a model to defend the American Republic — a classroom performance task), SS.C.16 (the evolution and function of the two-party system), SS.C.18 (the impact of special interest groups on public policy), and SS.C.21 (cooperation, competition, and conflict among nations — the United Nations, international treaties, terrorism). The catalog's civics is domestic structure, rights, and participation, so these are left unclaimed.
• Personal Finance — this rejection has been superseded, and its codes no longer mean what it said. Until 2026-08-28 this entry said West Virginia's Civics course carried a full Personal Finance strand at SS.C.30-39 and that the catalog met none of it. Both halves needed correcting. On the codes: under W. Va. 126CSR44D as filed July 8, 2024 and effective July 1, 2025, the Civics course runs SS.C.1 through SS.C.37 only, SS.C.38 and SS.C.39 do not exist, SS.C.30 and SS.C.31 are now ECONOMICS standards and SS.C.32-37 are GEOGRAPHY, and the ten personal-finance standards were moved to Appendix A of the rule and renumbered 1 through 10 with no code prefix. A rejection filed against SS.C.30 today would point at a standard about business climate, not about money management. On the substance: the catalog now teaches one personal-finance course, MONEY-01, and two Appendix A items are claimed above as partials, item 7 through the annual percentage rate and item 8 on its consumer-rights half, each with its gap named. The other six are still not claimed and the reasons are specific. Items 1 through 4 are postsecondary cost, income and lifestyle against education, career expectations, and workforce preparedness including resumes and mock interviews; item 5 is bankruptcy; item 6 was added as a narrow partial on 2026-08-29 and is dealt with on its own entry; item 5 is bankruptcy; the rest are completing income tax forms; item 9 is banking services and account fees; item 10 is investing and insurance. None of that is in this catalog, and MONEY-01 states in three separate lessons that it gives no financial advice, so a budgeting or investing claim would misdescribe it. TWO THINGS THIS PASS COULD NOT SETTLE, recorded rather than assumed: the superseded 2016 text of SS.C.30-39 could not be obtained from West Virginia's own publisher, so nothing is transcribed under those retired codes; and whether the SS.C civics and economics codes claimed elsewhere in this file also moved in the 2025 amendment has not been re-verified and is filed as a research check. UPDATED 2026-08-29: this entry's own claim that SS.C.38 does not exist has now been verified against a fresh fetch of the rule, and the contradiction it had with the Civics framework (which carried a claimed SS.C.38 entry) is resolved in this rule's favour. That claim moved to Appendix A item 9, which is where its text is actually printed. The research check on the OTHER SS.C codes stays open and is, if anything, more warranted: the same fetch shows the current SS.C.28 carrying the supply-and-demand text this file files under SS.C.25.
• Personal Finance (SS.C.30-39) — three of ten, and one claim moved to a code that exists. This entry used to read that the catalog taught none of West Virginia's Personal Finance strand. That is no longer true and the correction is recorded here rather than deleted, so a teacher can see exactly what changed and when. Personal finance now lives in Appendix A of Policy 2520.4, numbered 1 through 10; two of those ten are claimed above. SUPERSEDED AGAIN ON 2026-08-28, when MONEY-04 shipped, and both claimed items moved: Appendix A item 7 (consumer debt) was previously claimed on the annual-percentage-rate comparison method alone and now also carries pay-day loans and rent-to-own, each read from a state statute that governs it, though home loans and credit card debt remain outside it; and Appendix A item 8 (the savvy consumer) moved from partial to FULL, because the identify-and-avoid-fraudulent-practices and guard-against-identity-theft halves this catalog genuinely did not teach are now taught from 12 CFR part 1005 and from 15 U.S.C. 1681c-1 and 1681c-2. The other eight Appendix A items remain unclaimed and are named so the gap stays visible: the cost of postsecondary education, income and lifestyle against education and aid decisions, careers and lifelong earning potential, workforce preparedness, the causes of bankruptcy, completing federal and state income tax forms, banking services, and investing and insurance. Their verbatim text has not been transcribed here, so none of them carries a code entry, per fetch-or-do-not-cite. Later courses in the same series are planned to reach several of them; none is claimed before it is taught. SUPERSEDED A THIRD TIME ON 2026-08-29, and this one is a correction to our own record rather than to the catalog. Banking services, named just above as unclaimed, WAS claimed on 2026-08-28: MONEY-02 reached it, but the claim was filed in the Civics framework under SS.C.38, a code the current rule does not contain, which left this file asserting in one place that SS.C.38 does not exist and asserting in another that the catalog meets it. Policy 2520.4 was re-fetched from the Word version the WVBE policy viewer serves, since the PDF is a scan with no text layer. It contains thirty-seven SS.C codes and stops, and it prints the banking-services standard as Appendix A item 9. The claim has been moved to that locator unchanged, so three of the ten Appendix A items are now claimed (7 partial, 8 full, 9 partial) and seven are not: postsecondary cost, income and lifestyle, careers, workforce preparedness, bankruptcy, income tax forms, and investing and insurance.
• Geography (SS.C.40-43) — checked, thin overlap, not claimed. The Civics course's Geography strand (census and demographic analysis, geopolitical research, sustainable development, and geographic information systems) is human-environment and spatial geography. The catalog's growing-belts, resource-map, and climate content is geographic in flavor, but its overlap with these specific standards is adjacency-level at best; where that content maps squarely — how trade and commodities distribute wealth and shape economies — it is claimed under the Economics standards instead, not padded into Geography.
• The remaining Economics standards (SS.C.23, 24, 27, 28, 29). Beyond SS.C.25 (supply and demand affecting price) and SS.C.26 (the role of government in a free market), the Economics strand's other standards — opportunity cost and scarcity, allocating the factors of production, the household/business/government circular flow, local-to-global business climate, and the historical evolution of currency — are not the substance of this catalog's commodity history, so they are left unclaimed rather than stretched.
• The ELA grades 9, 10, and 12 standards, and the grade-11 standards outside the reading/writing/research claims above. West Virginia's ELA standards run across four grade bands (ELA.9, ELA.10, ELA.11, ELA.12). We claim only the grade-11 informational-reading, argument-writing, and research standards the catalog's media-literacy and source-evaluation teaching genuinely meets. The literature strands, the language and speaking/listening strands, and the near-identical standards in the other grade bands are not separately claimed, to avoid mapping the same teaching against four grades' worth of duplicate codes.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. West Virginia's closest frameworks for these (its Technology and Computer Science standards, WVBE Policy 2520.14, and its world-languages standards) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no West Virginia claims this pass.