RAGShield: Detecting Numerical Claim Manipulation in Government RAG Systems
About
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are deployed across federal agencies for citizen-facing tax guidance, benefits eligibility, and legal information, where a single incorrect number causes direct financial harm. This paper proves that all embedding-based RAG defenses share a fundamental blind spot: changing a tax deduction by $50,000 produces cosine similarity 0.9998, invisible to every known detection threshold. Across 174 manipulation pairs and two embedding models, the mean sensitivity gap is 1,459x. The blind spot is confirmed on real IRS documents.The root cause is that embeddings encode topic, not numerical precision. RAGShield sidesteps this by operating on extracted values directly: a pattern-based engine identifies dollar amounts and percentages in government text, links each value to its governing entity through two-pass context propagation (99.8% entity detection on 2,742 real IRS passages), and verifies every claim against a cross-source registry built from the corpus itself. A temporal tracker flags value changes that fall outside known government update schedules. On 430 attacks generated from real IRS document content, RAGShield detects every one (0.0% ASR, 95% CI [0%, 1%]) while embedding-based defenses miss 79-90% of the same attacks.