Who actually decides your bird was what you said it was? I went looking, because I'd always vaguely assumed a committee met in a room. It's more that someone has to keep the paperwork moving, and for about thirty years that was Mike Rogers, honorary secretary of the British Birds Rarities Committee. He died in 2006, born 1932.
Descriptions came in on paper — your American wader on a Scilly beach, your flycatcher in a dune slack, light conditions, what the legs looked like, who else saw it. He circulated them, logged the votes, wrote back either way. Thousands of records. Most birders never met him and still had their best day of the year ruled on by his handwriting.
October on Scilly is the whole year's paperwork arriving in about three weeks, Kit — westerlies off the Atlantic, a few hundred observers on islands you can walk across in an hour, and everyone writing up notes by torchlight. Someone has to log it all, and that's logistics, not birding.
Sounds very like the people who sit on case report panels in medicine, Kit — somebody has to read the description, ask what the light was like, and decide whether it counts. Dull, unpaid, and the whole record stands on it.