{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_four_proposal_generalization60_20260803","cell_id":"representation_independent_interface_contract__accounting_auditing","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"cand_journal_population_behavioral_contract_01","proposal_index":1,"version":0,"title":"Behavioral Contract for Substitutable Journal-Population Evidence","problem":"During an ERP replacement, an audit team’s journal-entry population procedure can remain nominally unchanged yet fail because its extraction, reconciliation, and sampling routines depend on the former system’s table layout, row ordering, sign convention, mutable spreadsheet columns, and error behavior. The accounting meaning of the requested population is not specified independently of those representations, so neither management nor the auditor has a reusable rule for deciding whether a new API, warehouse view, or file export supplies an equivalent population.","actors":["Controller responsible for the ledger population and its accounting semantics","Financial-systems owner maintaining extraction implementations","Internal audit or controls personnel testing completeness and lineage","External audit team consuming the population while retaining independent authority over evidence sufficiency","Data-security owner governing access to journal and supporting-document data"],"observable_state":"For one closed accounting period and an unchanged audit scope, the incumbent export and a proposed replacement expose different schemas, ordering, identifiers, rounding behavior, and failure modes. Existing audit routines either read implementation-specific fields directly or require a bespoke mapping. There is no representation-independent specification stating which postings belong, how each posting is identified, which totals must reconcile, what happens on incomplete retrieval, or which observable differences are permissible.","consequence":"A representation change can require broad rework, silently omit or duplicate in-scope postings, alter sample selection, or produce an apparently complete file whose equivalence to the incumbent cannot be evaluated without reconstructing source-specific knowledge.","affected_objective":"Obtain a complete, reproducible, traceable journal-entry population for a defined audit scope while allowing the underlying ERP, database, extraction algorithm, pagination method, and delivery format to change.","intervention":"Define an opaque, versioned Journal Population object by behavior rather than by tables or files. Its abstract state comprises a declared scope, a set of uniquely identified in-scope postings and lines, scope-level control totals, evidence-lineage receipts, and a lifecycle of Draft, Sealed, and Superseded. Its public operations declare or inspect scope; add data while Draft; seal a version; enumerate abstract entries through opaque continuation tokens; retrieve an entry by contractual posting identity; request control totals by declared balancing unit and currency; obtain a sanctioned lineage receipt; and verify seal status. Contract clauses require that a sealed version is immutable, every qualifying source posting appears exactly once, no out-of-scope posting appears, line amounts aggregate to the declared control totals, balancing rules hold for each contract-declared balancing unit, and every returned entry has a resolvable lineage receipt. Invalid scope, unsupported aggregation, stale token, duplicate identity, and incomplete retrieval produce typed failures without returning a silently partial population. Reads have no accounting side effects; access logging is permitted and declared. ERP tables, CSV columns, indexes, cache state, page boundaries, internal row keys, and default iteration order remain non-contractual. Each implementation supplies an abstraction mapping from its valid representation to the abstract population and must pass the same black-box conformance suite before substitution. The contract explicitly does not replace source-control testing or an auditor’s white-box inspection when those are required.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Abstract component and state model","domain_realization":"A versioned Journal Population whose meaning is its audit scope, abstract postings, control totals, lineage receipts, and Draft-Sealed-Superseded lifecycle."},{"archetype_element":"Observable operation surface","domain_realization":"Scope inspection, controlled population construction, sealing, entry enumeration, entry lookup, control-total retrieval, lineage-receipt retrieval, and seal verification."},{"archetype_element":"Behavioral laws and invariants","domain_realization":"Sealed immutability; exact-once inclusion of qualifying postings; exclusion of nonqualifying postings; reconciliation to declared control totals; balancing within declared units; and resolvable lineage for every entry."},{"archetype_element":"Hidden representation","domain_realization":"ERP tables, warehouse joins, flat-file columns, indexes, cache structures, internal keys, algorithms, page boundaries, and incidental ordering are excluded from the public contract."},{"archetype_element":"Error semantics and side-effect limits","domain_realization":"Typed failures replace silent partial results, rejected operations leave abstract state unchanged, reads cannot post or modify accounting records, and declared access logs are the only permitted read side effect."},{"archetype_element":"Conformance oracle","domain_realization":"One implementation-parameterized black-box suite checks fixtures, operation sequences, reconciliation, exact-once membership, immutability, error behavior, and sanctioned lineage solely through public operations."},{"archetype_element":"Substitutability and versioning rule","domain_realization":"A new extractor is eligible to replace another only for the same contract version after passing the shared oracle; behavioral breaks require a new major contract version and an explicit consumer migration."},{"archetype_element":"Leakage control and stewardship","domain_realization":"Reviewers inventory client dependencies and probe ordering, token contents, raw keys, filenames, error text, and timing for useful but unpromised signals; the controller owns semantic changes while the auditor independently decides evidentiary sufficiency."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"abstract_data_type_specification","role":"Defines the representation-free journal population, its lifecycle, membership and reconciliation invariants, and the abstraction mapping each extractor must supply from concrete records to abstract postings.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, the contract would reduce to a list of export operations and could not determine whether two different schemas denote the same audit population."},{"mechanism_slug":"design_by_contract_clause","role":"Assigns preconditions, postconditions, and typed failure behavior to scope declaration, sealing, enumeration, reconciliation, and lineage retrieval.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, incomplete retrieval, duplicate identities, or mutation after sealing could be handled differently by each implementation while all still claimed conformance."},{"mechanism_slug":"opaque_type_or_module_boundary","role":"Prevents consumer routines from reaching ERP tables, raw row keys, or mutable internal collections; sanctioned control-total and lineage operations provide the necessary inspection windows.","counterfactual_removal":"Without enforced opacity, audit routines could continue coupling to implementation fields and a passing replacement could still break those routines."},{"mechanism_slug":"black_box_contract_test_suite","role":"Provides the common acceptance oracle applied unchanged to the incumbent adapter, a simple model implementation, and any replacement extractor.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a shared oracle, substitution would depend on implementation-specific walkthroughs or assertions of similarity rather than repeatable behavioral evidence."},{"mechanism_slug":"property_based_conformance_test","role":"Generates scoped postings and operation sequences to test exact-once membership, control-total preservation, sealing immutability, and deterministic abstract lookup across edge cases.","counterfactual_removal":"Without generated sequences, hand-selected examples could miss combinations involving reversals, duplicate-looking lines, multiple currencies, or pagination boundaries."},{"mechanism_slug":"representation_leakage_probe","role":"Compares everything consumers can observe with the promised surface and flags decodable tokens, default ordering, raw keys, filenames, timing, or error wording that could become unofficial dependencies.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the probe, the formal boundary could remain intact while useful representation signals leak through public operations and recreate coupling."},{"mechanism_slug":"semantic_versioning_and_deprecation_gate","role":"Records behavioral contract versions, classifies changes by compatibility, and requires consumer inventory and migration before removing or changing a promised behavior.","counterfactual_removal":"Without version governance, stewardship could change scope or error semantics in place and make prior conformance results irrelevant without warning."}],"causal_chain":["Consumer routines currently depend on concrete export features because the required journal population is described partly through those features.","The intervention defines population meaning, operations, lifecycle, invariants, failures, and allowed observations independently of any export representation.","Opaque access and leakage review prevent new client dependencies on tables, row order, page structure, and internal identifiers.","Each concrete extractor maps its valid internal state to the same abstract postings, totals, and lineage receipts.","The shared black-box and property-based oracle tests the externally meaningful obligations across implementations and operation sequences.","Only an implementation satisfying the same contract version becomes eligible for substitution; incompatible semantic changes pass through explicit version and migration governance.","If the contract is sufficiently discriminating, a storage or ERP change can be evaluated through the reusable oracle while audit consumers continue using the promised behavioral surface."],"baseline":"Continue distributing the incumbent ERP export and maintain audit scripts against its columns, ordering, identifiers, and reconciliation workbook. For each system change, create a new field mapping and manually compare selected totals and records before rewriting dependent procedures.","nearest_rivals":["Create a canonical audit-data warehouse schema. This may centralize fields but makes the shared table layout itself the contract and does not by itself specify lifecycle, exact-once membership, typed failures, side effects, or substitutability tests.","Build a bespoke crosswalk from the new ERP export to the old file layout. This can preserve existing routines for one migration but carries forward accidental behavior and supplies no reusable behavioral oracle for later representations.","Run a one-time parallel reconciliation between incumbent and replacement exports. This can expose observed differences for the chosen period but may freeze incumbent defects and does not define which differences are contractual.","Give auditors direct read access to source-system tables and document the new schema. This supports inspection but retains representation coupling and requires source-specific procedure changes."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"Relative to these rivals, the testable contrast is whether defining a sealed journal population by scope, abstract operations, invariants, errors, side-effect limits, and a reusable black-box acceptance oracle permits two differently represented extractors to support the same consumer procedure without a shared physical schema or a bespoke consumer rewrite. This is a bounded design hypothesis, not a novelty or effect claim.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The controller may approve the accounting semantics and an offline internal pilot jointly with the financial-systems and data-security owners. The system owner controls implementation deployment. External auditors retain independent authority to decide whether outputs and source-control evidence are sufficient for their audit; neither a contract nor a passing suite binds that judgment.","authorized_first_step":"Construct a read-only prototype contract, an in-memory model implementation, and an adapter over one access-approved closed-period export; run the conformance suite offline on synthetic fixtures and that bounded period without changing ledger records or an active audit procedure.","excluded_actions":["Posting, reversing, editing, or deleting accounting entries","Replacing the production extraction path or an approved audit procedure","Treating conformance as an audit opinion, control certification, or evidence-sufficiency decision","Suppressing discrepancies, changing thresholds after observing results, or weakening invariants to make an implementation pass","Exposing raw journal data, supporting documents, credentials, or identifiers beyond existing access authorization","Using opacity to deny an auditor source-level inspection that the auditor determines is necessary"],"halt_rollback":"Stop the pilot on an authorization breach, unexplained population or control-total difference, unresolved lineage receipt, invariant failure, or evidence that a required audit observation cannot be expressed without exposing representation. Preserve discrepancy records, revoke prototype access, remove pilot copies under the applicable retention policy, and continue using the unchanged incumbent extraction process."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"The strongest counterevidence would be that evidence sufficiency for the target procedure necessarily depends on inspecting source-specific tables, transformation controls, or processing traces that cannot be represented as sanctioned contractual observations; in that case a black-box population cannot serve as the governing substitution boundary.","problem_falsifier":"The inferred problem is falsified if a dependency inventory and controlled representation swap show that every consumer already relies only on documented accounting semantics, no routines inspect or infer internal layout, and equivalent populations can be substituted without mappings, rewrites, or ambiguous reconciliation decisions.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is falsified if two independently implemented extractors can pass the predeclared conformance suite for the same contract version yet yield materially different population membership, totals, lineage, or downstream sample selection, or if expressing the missing discriminator necessarily fixes a particular storage representation.","risks":["A mistaken abstract scope or invariant could standardize the wrong accounting meaning.","A weak oracle could admit omissions or duplicates, while an over-specified oracle could freeze incidental behavior.","An adapter may hide source-extraction defects behind a clean interface.","Opaque access could obstruct legitimate audit inspection unless lineage and escalation paths are explicit.","Stable posting identities or lineage receipts could expose sensitive information.","Consumers may form new dependencies on ordering, timing, token structure, or error wording.","Version governance and stewardship may add work without reducing migration effort.","Synthetic generators may fail to exercise rare posting configurations or source-system constraints."]},"next_evidence_step":"Within one access-approved, closed accounting period, predeclare a small fixture matrix covering ordinary entries, reversals, duplicate-looking lines, excluded statuses, multiple currencies, unsupported requests, interrupted pagination, and post-seal mutation. Implement the contract once as a simple in-memory model and once as a read-only adapter over the incumbent export. Run the identical black-box and property-based tests against both, then ask one audit-methodology reviewer—without changing any active procedure—to classify every observed output as contractual, sanctioned introspection, or representation leakage. Record divergences and stop after this single-period evaluation; passing would justify only a separately authorized replacement-adapter test.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"No prior experiment candidates or other cells were consulted. Diversity from them is therefore unassessed; this proposal is derived solely from the supplied archetype, mechanisms, and accounting-and-auditing domain card.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Complete representation-independent domain mapping","Concrete actors, observable state, and consequence","Explicit behavioral surface, invariants, errors, and side-effect limits","Mechanism-specific counterfactual removals","Rivals and remaining contrastive claim","Authority boundaries and reversible first step","Problem and intervention falsifiers"],"conceptual_changes":["Initial version defines audit journal population equivalence as behavioral rather than file- or schema-based.","Separates contract conformance from audit evidence sufficiency and source-control inspection."],"operational_changes":["Initial version bounds testing to an offline closed-period adapter and in-memory model.","Adds predeclared halt conditions and preserves the incumbent extraction path."],"evidence_changes":["Prior art remains unsearched.","First evidence is limited to synthetic fixtures and one authorized closed period."],"claim_changes":["Makes no claim of novelty, prevalence, demand, or effect size.","Limits the claim to a falsifiable comparison between a behavioral substitution boundary and representation-specific migration approaches."]}}