{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp09_archetype_breadth150_20260804","cell_id":"circuit_breaker__accounting_auditing","arm":"BREADTH_PROBE_ONE_SHOT","candidate_id":"circuit_breaker__accounting_auditing__P1","proposal_index":1,"version":0,"title":"Close-Period Journal Intake Breaker","problem":"During a financial close, new manual journal entries continue entering a shared approval workflow after the available reviewers become saturated. Because the same reviewers also perform reconciliations and close controls, the growing approval backlog transmits delay and error pressure into other close activities.","actors":["Journal preparers","Journal-entry approvers","Business-unit controllers","Corporate controller","Financial-close coordinator","Internal and external auditors"],"observable_state":"The breaker observes the count and age distribution of pending journal entries, reviewer utilization, and entry rework rate. A candidate opening condition is that the eligible approval queue exceeds 80 entries or its 90th-percentile wait exceeds six hours for 30 consecutive minutes while reviewer utilization remains above 90%. These are test parameters, not established thresholds.","consequence":"Entries wait longer for review, approvers interrupt reconciliation work, late adjustments accumulate, and management faces a choice between delaying the close and compressing review time in ways that may weaken financial-reporting controls.","affected_objective":"Complete an accurate, timely, and auditable financial close without weakening journal authorization, evidence retention, or ledger integrity.","intervention":"Place a controllable boundary before the journal-approval queue. When overload conditions persist, open the breaker for noncritical manual entries: do not admit them to posting or approval, return an explicit deferred status, record the attempted submission in an immutable deferral register, and assign an owner and resubmission deadline. Continue admitting predefined critical classes such as payroll, cash, tax, and controller-approved material corrections. Enter a half-open state only after the queue remains below a lower recovery threshold, such as 30 entries with a 90th-percentile wait below two hours for two consecutive hours. In half-open state, admit a small stratified probe across business units and entry types; close fully only if queue age and rework remain within recovery limits, otherwise reopen immediately.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Flow","domain_realization":"Manual journal-entry submissions flowing from preparers into a shared approval and posting process."},{"archetype_element":"Capacity constraint","domain_realization":"Finite reviewer attention during close, measured through queue depth, wait time, utilization, and rework."},{"archetype_element":"Coupling and cascade risk","domain_realization":"Journal review and reconciliations depend on the same personnel and close timetable, so approval saturation disrupts other controls and creates additional late adjustments."},{"archetype_element":"Boundary","domain_realization":"An admission gate between journal submission and the approval queue that can accept, defer, or exceptionally admit an entry."},{"archetype_element":"Feedback","domain_realization":"Breaker state changes in response to sustained queue and review-health measurements rather than a fixed calendar rule."},{"archetype_element":"Representative sampling","domain_realization":"Half-open probes are stratified across business units and entry types so recovery is not inferred from one unusually easy class of entries."},{"archetype_element":"Invariant preservation","domain_realization":"No accepted entry is silently dropped or partially posted; deferred entries remain unposted, explicitly labeled, attributable, and auditable."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"half_open_state","role":"Provides a distinct recovery state between blocking eligible intake and restoring full intake.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, the workflow would jump directly from deferral to full inflow and could recreate the reviewer overload before recovery is established."},{"mechanism_slug":"limited_probe","role":"Admits a bounded, stratified set of entries to test whether review capacity has recovered.","counterfactual_removal":"Without probes, reopening would rely only on an emptying backlog and would not test performance under renewed intake."},{"mechanism_slug":"hysteresis","role":"Uses stricter opening thresholds and lower, sustained recovery thresholds to prevent rapid switching near saturation.","counterfactual_removal":"Without hysteresis, small queue fluctuations could repeatedly open and close intake, making submission status unpredictable."},{"mechanism_slug":"clean_rejection","role":"Returns a definite deferred outcome with a recorded owner and deadline instead of silently accumulating work in the protected queue.","counterfactual_removal":"Without clean rejection, blocked work could become an invisible secondary backlog or be mistaken for an accepted journal."}],"causal_chain":["Close-period journal submissions arrive faster than the shared reviewer pool can complete control-compliant review.","The approval queue grows and wait times rise.","Because reviewers also own reconciliations and related close controls, journal saturation propagates into those activities and generates further late work.","Sustained overload signals open the admission boundary for noncritical manual entries while critical exceptions remain explicitly governed.","Reduced intake lets reviewers drain accepted work and resume coupled close controls without relaxing approval requirements.","Lower, sustained queue and wait signals move the breaker to half-open.","A limited, stratified probe tests renewed load; healthy feedback permits gradual restoration, while renewed saturation reopens the breaker."],"baseline":"All properly formatted journals enter the common approval queue until a calendar cutoff; managers then prioritize, expedite, or add reviewers after congestion is visible. Intake is not automatically restricted in response to sustained capacity signals, and reopening is not tested through a separate recovery state.","nearest_rivals":["A fixed close-calendar submission cutoff or blackout, which restricts entries by time rather than measured saturation and recovery.","Priority triage within the approval queue, which changes processing order but continues admitting work into the overloaded system.","Temporary reviewer reassignment, which attempts to increase capacity without isolating the shared workflow from continued inflow.","Audit sampling of journal entries, which selects evidence for testing rather than controlling operational intake and recovery."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"Relative to these rivals, the proposed design specifically couples a stateful intake boundary to sustained reviewer-capacity feedback and restores flow through a limited, representative half-open probe; it is not merely a cutoff, prioritization rule, staffing response, or audit-test sample.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The corporate controller owns breaker policy and critical-entry definitions; the close coordinator may activate or change state within that approved policy, while any material-correction exception requires documented controller approval.","authorized_first_step":"Run a read-only shadow evaluation against one completed close-period event log, classifying when the proposed states would have changed without blocking, posting, approving, or altering any journal.","excluded_actions":["Automatically posting or approving an entry","Deleting or modifying an accepted journal or its evidence","Silently dropping a deferred submission","Deferring payroll, cash, tax, or a documented material correction without the approved exception process","Changing accounting policy, materiality judgments, segregation-of-duties rules, or auditor access","Activating the breaker in production during the first evidence step"],"halt_rollback":"Halt evaluation if required timestamps, entry classifications, or reviewer assignments are unreliable, or if critical entries cannot be identified prospectively. A later live pilot must support immediate manual closure of the breaker, preserve every state transition and decision log, and admit previously deferred entries only through normal controls."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Close delays and review failures occur when journal inflow and approval-queue measures are low, while delays instead track missing source data, unresolved accounting judgments, system defects, or authorization gaps.","problem_falsifier":"The proposed overload signals do not precede or co-occur with disruption to journal review and coupled close controls across the examined close log, indicating that flow-plus-capacity-plus-coupling is not the operative problem.","intervention_falsifier":"In replay, reducing eligible journal intake would not create a sustained recovery window, or the entries that would be deferred disproportionately contain time-critical or material corrections that cannot safely wait under the exception policy.","risks":["A deferred adjustment may be omitted from the final statements if ownership and resubmission controls fail.","Preparers may misclassify entries as critical to bypass the boundary.","Poorly chosen thresholds may open during manageable peaks or fail to open during genuine saturation.","Probe entries may not represent the review effort of the full backlog.","Breaker oscillation may disrupt preparers if hysteresis is insufficient.","Reduced intake may conceal a staffing, data-quality, system, or authorization problem rather than address it.","The deferral register may become an indefinite secondary queue.","Business units with fewer exception privileges may bear disproportionate deferral costs."]},"next_evidence_step":"Using only one completed close period, replay timestamped journal submissions, approvals, rework events, reviewer assignments, reconciliation milestones, and approved criticality labels. Apply the stated opening, recovery, and half-open rules in shadow mode; report which entries would have been deferred, whether critical entries would have been misclassified, whether reviewer workload would have fallen enough to reach the recovery condition, and whether a stratified probe would have reopened the breaker. Stop after this single replay and make no production changes.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Generated as an isolated one-shot breadth probe; no other proposals or experiment cells were inspected or used for comparison.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}