Provincial forest management agencies across Canada are attempting to recover suppression costs plus losses to real property due to human-caused fires when negligence is involved. These agencies are responsible for investigating these fires, and they commonly restrict all access to the fire origin area. These agencies commonly employ well trained fire investigators, who are well aware of standards for documenting wildland fires. However, in many cases, the quality of the investigations is poor, and the cost of finding this additional information is great. In this paper, I identify the minimum information required before an investigation file should be considered complete and charges can be laid. Key words: wildland fire, investigation, reports, litigation, standards