Since this keeps coming up: do you know what causes it? You could "calibrate" it by checking the user's profile, which is updated real-time (unlike the Merit count shown left from each post).
Actually it's not always updated real-time, and that's exactly the problem.
Nevermind, too sleepy right now.User is about to be notified for merits for the first time -> bot scrapes his profile for his merit count and the number is cached (so it doesn't have to visit each profile every time).
Then with every following merit, it uses cached value + merit amount. If the bot misses a merit tx, it will be off by that value until manually fixed.
I'll probably do a single extra rescrape for everyone so it's definitely updated and then maybe every ~1 week (?).