{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_full320_20260801","cell_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__accounting_auditing","trajectory_id":"R","attempt_index":0,"archetype_slug":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management","domain_slug":"accounting_auditing","decision":"CANDIDATE","problem_id":"superseded_audit_evidence_remains_operationally_active","causal_lever_id":"explicit_workpaper_lifecycle_state_and_gated_disposition","proposal":{"problem":"Across recurring audits, repositories accumulate prior-period, duplicated, and superseded workpapers and evidence that remain searchable without a reliable current-versus-historical distinction. Auditors may retrieve stale material as current support, while uncertain dependencies, retention duties, and legal holds discourage cleanup or make deletion unsafe.","actors_substrate":["audit engagement teams","engagement partner","audit records and compliance personnel","client accounting personnel","regulators and investigators","users relying on audited conclusions","workpaper repositories containing evidence, analyses, judgments, and review records"],"observable_state":"Search results and engagement folders contain multiple evidence versions with missing or inconsistent lifecycle labels, unresolved references, unclear retention authority, and archival copies whose restorability is untested.","consequence":"Stale evidence can influence current-period procedures or conclusions; review and search effort rises; storage grows; and improvised cleanup can destroy required support, lineage, or reconstruction capability.","affected_objective":"Maintain efficient, reproducible, and defensible audits while preventing obsolete evidence from masquerading as current support.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"sequential deposits","domain_realization":"Recurring engagements deposit workpapers, evidence snapshots, exported reports, review notes, and revised analyses.","claim_kind":"INFERENCE"},{"archetype_element":"stale layers remain active","domain_realization":"Superseded or prior-period artifacts remain discoverable without consistently losing current-evidence status.","claim_kind":"HYPOTHESIS"},{"archetype_element":"retention versus removal tension","domain_realization":"Reducing stale search exposure conflicts with preservation of audit support, lineage, holds, and investigation access.","claim_kind":"INFERENCE"},{"archetype_element":"managed lifecycle governance","domain_realization":"Explicit current, superseded, archived, held, quarantined, and destroyed states govern visibility and disposition.","claim_kind":"HYPOTHESIS"}],"component_map":[{"component":"layer_inventory_and_identity_map","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Identity-resolved register of workpapers, evidence versions, duplicates, and repository locations."},{"component":"deposition_order_and_age_index","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Engagement period, creation date, finalization date, and version sequence."},{"component":"retention_policy_matrix","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Workpaper-class-to-minimum, maximum, and disposition rules with cited authority."},{"component":"decay_function_or_aging_rule","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Authority decays on period rollover, source-system change, control change, or supersession rather than age alone."},{"component":"expiration_trigger_definition","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Class schedule plus supersession or failed revalidation triggers archival review, not automatic destruction."},{"component":"layer_value_and_risk_score","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Visible attributes for evidentiary relevance, retrieval demand, recreation cost, sensitivity, and retention risk."},{"component":"dependency_and_reconstruction_check","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Pre-disposition check for citations, conclusions, review trails, rollforwards, and reconstruction paths."},{"component":"pruning_or_archival_pathway","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Refresh, supersede, archive, compact, quarantine, or authorized destruction."},{"component":"preservation_exception_register","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Named evidentiary, historical, investigation, and dispute exceptions with owners and review dates."},{"component":"deletion_audit_and_rollback_window","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Logged soft deletion with reason, approver, grace period, and restore action."},{"component":"resource_budget_and_storage_tier","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Capacity and retrieval targets for active, nearline, cold, and deep archive storage."},{"component":"review_cadence_and_revalidation_loop","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Periodic review of stale flags, exceptions, policy mappings, and restore results."},{"component":"legal_hold_or_compliance_override","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Hold or mandatory-retention status blocks disposition regardless of age or access."},{"component":"hot_warm_cold_access_state","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Current-engagement, recent-history, archive, and deep-archive access states."},{"component":"orphan_layer_detection","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Identification of artifacts with no live citation, workflow, conclusion, or reconstruction dependency."},{"component":"supersession_marker","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Durable marker naming the successor and preventing the older version from appearing current."},{"component":"layer_compaction_candidate_flag","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Flag redundant exports or immutable bundles suitable for lossless packaging or deduplication."},{"component":"rehydration_or_restore_procedure","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Documented retrieval, parsing, reconciliation, and reconnection of archived evidence."},{"component":"deletion_impact_estimate","status":"direct","domain_realization":"Estimate of affected conclusions, users, dependencies, recovery difficulty, and compliance exposure."},{"component":"stale_context_detector","status":"adapted","domain_realization":"Flags period mismatch, superseded source, broken citation, changed system, or changed control context."}],"mechanism_dispositions":[{"slug":"age_weighted_value_score","disposition":"considered_rejected","contribution_type":"NONE","adaptation_or_rejection":"Reject a composite age-discounted score because evidentiary and retention value may not decline monotonically and false precision could override hard duties.","counterfactual_removal":"No material loss; transparent attributes and hard gates provide safer triage."},{"slug":"archive_restore_test","disposition":"selected_supporting","contribution_type":"TEST_DESIGN","adaptation_or_rejection":"Sample archived workpapers across age and format bands; restore, parse, reconcile, and reconnect them.","counterfactual_removal":"Archival viability would remain assumed, so tiering could silently become irreversible loss."},{"slug":"cache_eviction_rule","disposition":"incompatible","contribution_type":"NONE","adaptation_or_rejection":"Access recency cannot authorize evidence removal, and admission pressure is not the governing trigger.","counterfactual_removal":"No causal loss; storage migration can occur without cache-style victim selection."},{"slug":"dependency_safe_delete_check","disposition":"selected_load_bearing","contribution_type":"SAFETY_GUARDRAIL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Trace live citations, conclusions, review trails, rollforwards, and reconstruction references before disposition.","counterfactual_removal":"Deletion could break audit support or reproducibility, hard-gating viability."},{"slug":"lifecycle_storage_tiering_policy","disposition":"selected_supporting","contribution_type":"OPERATIONAL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Move eligible material from current-engagement access through progressively colder archives without treating demotion as destruction.","counterfactual_removal":"Stale visibility could still fall, but retention would remain unnecessarily costly and operationally brittle."},{"slug":"log_rotation_and_cleanup_job","disposition":"considered_rejected","contribution_type":"NONE","adaptation_or_rejection":"Generational position is too content-blind for heterogeneous audit evidence and cannot safely determine purge.","counterfactual_removal":"No material loss because repository objects are governed by class, dependency, and hold state."},{"slug":"retention_schedule","disposition":"selected_load_bearing","contribution_type":"CORE_CAUSAL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Map each workpaper class to retention bounds, disposition, authority, exceptions, and holds.","counterfactual_removal":"No legitimate rule would determine when archival or destruction is permitted or required."},{"slug":"soft_delete_quarantine_window","disposition":"selected_load_bearing","contribution_type":"SAFETY_GUARDRAIL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Hide approved deletion candidates while preserving recoverability for an impact-sized grace period.","counterfactual_removal":"Early mistakes become irreversible, making bounded automation unsafe."},{"slug":"stale_layer_detection_dashboard","disposition":"selected_load_bearing","contribution_type":"CORE_CAUSAL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Inventory artifacts and surface context-sensitive staleness with owners and confidence labels.","counterfactual_removal":"Stale artifacts remain unidentified and cannot be systematically demoted or refreshed."},{"slug":"time_to_live_ttl_policy","disposition":"considered_rejected","contribution_type":"NONE","adaptation_or_rejection":"Reject blind self-executing expiry; use review eligibility after retention, dependency, and hold checks.","counterfactual_removal":"No loss; eliminating TTL avoids premature expiry while retaining explicit triggers."},{"slug":"tombstone_or_deletion_marker","disposition":"selected_supporting","contribution_type":"OPERATIONAL","adaptation_or_rejection":"Leave a minimal marker recording deletion or supersession and successor resolution.","counterfactual_removal":"Users and references could confuse deletion with absence or retrieve an obsolete replica."}],"causal_chain":["Inventory and context checks identify artifacts that are duplicated, superseded, or no longer valid for current-period reliance.","Lifecycle labels and supersession markers remove flagged artifacts from current-evidence visibility.","The retention schedule, holds, preservation exceptions, and dependency checks gate every disposition.","Eligible artifacts move to cheaper archives or reversible quarantine; only authorized, dependency-safe candidates reach destruction.","Restore drills and periodic revalidation test whether preserved audit memory remains usable.","Search ambiguity and maintenance burden should fall without sacrificing reconstruction or accountability."],"baseline":"Teams retain broad engagement folders, rely on naming conventions and individual memory to distinguish versions, archive periodically, and postpone deletion when obligations or dependencies are unclear.","nearest_rival":"A retention-schedule-only cleanup that deletes or archives material solely by record class and engagement age, without context staleness detection, dependency tracing, supersession resolution, or restore testing.","authority_safety":{"affected_parties":["audit engagement teams","client accounting personnel","records and compliance personnel","regulators and investigators","users whose assurance depends on supported conclusions"],"decision_authority":"The engagement partner controls evidentiary status; designated records/compliance authority approves retention mappings, holds, archival rules, and destruction.","authorized_first_step":"Run a read-only inventory on one closed engagement and one current engagement; label a bounded sample as current, superseded, held, or archive-eligible, then archive copies and test restoration without permanent deletion.","excluded_actions":["altering finalized workpaper content","removing hold-protected or minimum-retention material","automatic hard deletion","using age or access alone as destruction authority","concealing lifecycle actions from the audit log"],"halt_rollback":"Halt on any unresolved dependency, hold conflict, unauthorized status change, failed reconciliation, or restore failure; revert visibility labels and restore quarantined artifacts from preserved originals."}},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Repositories may already enforce engagement-period separation, immutable final files, reliable version status, tested archives, and retention controls; if stale artifacts are rarely retrieved or misapplied, an added lifecycle layer would create overhead without solving a material failure.","analogy_break":"Audit workpapers are not disposable cache entries: historical evidence can remain necessary despite low access, finalized-file integrity may prohibit mutation, and retention authority can dominate age, cost, or apparent current usefulness.","failure_condition":"The approach fails if dependency discovery cannot see material external references, lifecycle labels are not honored by search, archive restores are unreliable, or governance permits holds and exceptions to become unreviewed permanent states.","problem_falsifier":"Across sampled engagements, nearly all artifacts have correct current/superseded status, users do not retrieve stale evidence as current, search and review burden is immaterial, and retention or deletion uncertainty does not delay disposition.","intervention_falsifier":"Compared with the baseline, the bounded pilot does not reduce stale artifacts in current search results, mistaken current-period retrievals, or review time, or it produces any missed dependency, hold breach, reconciliation failure, or unrecoverable archive.","risks":["Incorrect stale classification could hide valid evidence.","Incomplete dependency graphs could permit destructive disposition.","Lifecycle metadata could expose sensitive engagement information.","Cold-tier latency could impede investigations or inspection response.","Exceptions and tombstones could themselves accumulate indefinitely.","Deletion could conflict with retention, privacy, or preservation duties."]},"null_rationale":null,"classification":{"candidate_kind":"MECHANISM_COMPOSITION","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","evidence_maturity":"HYPOTHESIS"},"revision_change_log":{"revision_kind":"ORIGINAL","prior_problem_id":null,"prior_causal_lever_id":null,"problem_changed":false,"causal_lever_changed":false,"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"repairs_addressed":[]},"confidence":0.88,"generator_notes":"Closed-book structural inference from the supplied archetype, mechanisms, and domain context; empirical prevalence and effect claims remain hypotheses."}