Occupancy licensing needs to know whether a food-truck vendor's public health permit is currently active. Which source class is the primary business-OSINT check?

When occupancy licensing needs to know whether a food-truck vendor’s public health permit is currently active, the primary business-OSINT check is the city’s official license and permit lookup portal. Permit status is a public bulletin-board problem for municipal licensing, not a rumor-mill problem. Relying on an anonymous forum thread about the truck’s tacos fails as gossip rather than status evidence suitable for an occupancy decision. Using a closed-source dump of inspector credentials from a breach fails as illegal or unethical closed data and is outside PORP ethics. Accepting a verbal “we are licensed” from the vendor with no public record cited fails because self-assertion is not a permit record the city can audit. Exam caveat: portal lag can exist—if the portal and vendor disagree, note both dated observations and escalate to the licensing office rather than guessing. Operational check: query the official permit portal; capture result, permit number, and retrieval date; place that status in the occupancy file before relying on any secondary claim from forums or sales talk. In municipal practice, record the rationale in the case file so future staff know which control was chosen and which failure modes the rejected options would create for city services.