{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp09_archetype_breadth150_20260804","cell_id":"emergent_pattern_detection__accounting_auditing","arm":"BREADTH_PROBE_ONE_SHOT","candidate_id":"emergent_pattern_detection__accounting_auditing__P1","proposal_index":1,"version":0,"title":"Circular Intercompany Adjustment Pattern Sentinel","problem":"During period close, accountants in separate legal entities independently clear local intercompany discrepancies with temporary reclasses, suspense postings, reversals, and replacement journals. Each adjustment may be locally reasonable and individually approved, yet repeated responses can interact across entities and periods to form a circular adjustment network in which discrepancies migrate among accounts or counterparties instead of being resolved. No entity team sees enough of the network to recognize the forming pattern.","actors":["Entity accountants who prepare intercompany adjustments","Counterparty accountants in other legal entities","Entity controllers and journal approvers","Group consolidation team","Internal audit or audit-analytics reviewers"],"observable_state":"Across multiple entities and close periods, clusters of similar-value intercompany journals are posted near close, reversed or reclassified shortly afterward, and followed by related adjustments involving another entity, account, or counterparty. Pairwise balances may appear temporarily cleared while journal lineage and counterparty relationships show recurring loops, expanding chains, or repeated migration of unresolved amounts. Each flagged pattern retains entity, account class, timing, preparer-independent workflow context, stated adjustment reason, reversal relationship, and evidence-strength markers.","consequence":"If the pattern persists, the group may carry unresolved intercompany differences through successive closes, consume review capacity on repeated compensating work, delay consolidation decisions, or retain uncertainty about whether consolidated balances and eliminations represent the underlying transactions.","affected_objective":"Produce supportable consolidated financial statements through timely, traceable resolution of intercompany differences rather than repeated local displacement of those differences.","intervention":"Create a read-only sensing layer over existing intercompany reconciliation and journal metadata. Link local postings through counterparty, amount band, account class, timing, reversal, reference, and clearing relationships; aggregate those links across entities and periods; and compare resulting network motifs with an approved baseline of ordinary close variation. Surface candidate circular or migrating adjustment patterns with their local context, uncertainty, and lineage. A controller-led interpretation panel classifies each candidate as expected, harmful, ambiguous, or unsupported. Harmful or ambiguous candidates trigger a bounded reconciliation investigation; unsupported candidates update thresholds and exclusions. The detector never posts entries or determines misconduct.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Local Signal Collection","domain_realization":"Existing journal, reversal, clearing, reconciliation-break, counterparty, timing, and adjustment-reason metadata from individual entity closes."},{"archetype_element":"Aggregation Rule","domain_realization":"Link signals across entity, counterparty, account class, amount band, close window, reversal lineage, and successive periods to construct adjustment chains and loops."},{"archetype_element":"Pattern Detector","domain_realization":"Flag recurrent loops, expanding chains, and discrepancy migration that differ from the approved baseline of ordinary pairwise correction behavior."},{"archetype_element":"Context Marker","domain_realization":"Attach journal purpose, entity constraints, approval path, source transaction reference, local reconciliation status, and known close events to every pattern hypothesis."},{"archetype_element":"Desirability Classification","domain_realization":"A controller-led panel labels each hypothesis expected correction, potentially harmful displacement, ambiguous, or unsupported, while recording confidence and affected entities."},{"archetype_element":"Response Rule","domain_realization":"Route potentially harmful or ambiguous patterns to a named reconciliation owner for source-document investigation; archive expected patterns and use unsupported flags for detector tuning."},{"archetype_element":"Feedback Review Loop","domain_realization":"After investigation, compare the hypothesis with documented transaction causes and revise links, windows, thresholds, exclusions, and classifications before another use."},{"archetype_element":"Baseline and Variation Frame","domain_realization":"Use previously closed periods and documented recurring eliminations to distinguish ordinary reversals and timing differences from newly forming cross-entity motifs."},{"archetype_element":"Human Interpretation Panel","domain_realization":"Entity controllers, a consolidation representative, and an audit-analytics reviewer interpret candidate patterns without delegating accounting judgments to the detector."},{"archetype_element":"Privacy and Legitimacy Guardrail","domain_realization":"Use transaction and workflow-role metadata only where needed, suppress preparer names during initial review, restrict access, and prohibit employee-performance or disciplinary use of unverified flags."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"weak_signal_aggregation","role":"Combines individually ordinary reversals, reclasses, and reconciliation breaks into evidence of a possible cross-entity adjustment loop.","counterfactual_removal":"Without aggregation, each entry remains a local event and the distributed circular pattern is not represented."},{"mechanism_slug":"incident_pattern_mining","role":"Treats documented reconciliation breaks and repeated correction episodes as related incidents and searches their lineage for recurrence across entities and periods.","counterfactual_removal":"Without cross-incident comparison, reviewers can repeatedly close individual breaks without testing whether they are manifestations of one system-level pattern."},{"mechanism_slug":"emergent_behavior_dashboard","role":"Displays the candidate network, retained local context, uncertainty, classification, investigation owner, and review outcome.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a shared review surface, pattern hypotheses remain fragmented and are not reliably coupled to interpretation, response, and detector revision."}],"causal_chain":["Separate entity teams encounter local intercompany differences under close-time constraints.","Teams independently post approved temporary corrections that clear or reduce their visible local differences.","Counterparties respond to the changed balances with further reversals, reclasses, or replacement journals.","Those locally reasonable responses can interact across entities and periods, causing an unresolved amount to migrate or circulate.","Ordinary pairwise matching and isolated journal review show the component events but not the evolving network motif.","Cross-entity weak-signal aggregation makes candidate loops or chains visible while retaining the context of each component posting.","Human reviewers classify the candidate and, when warranted, investigate the underlying transaction lineage rather than another local symptom.","Investigation outcomes feed back into reconciliation action and detector tuning, changing both the observed pattern and future sensing rules."],"baseline":"Current close control relies on pairwise intercompany matching, aged-difference reports, entity-level journal approval, consolidation review, and investigation after a material or persistent mismatch becomes visible. These controls can identify unmatched balances or unusual individual postings but do not necessarily represent relationships among successive locally corrective actions across several entities and periods.","nearest_rivals":["Pairwise intercompany reconciliation, which matches reciprocal balances but may not identify multi-entity adjustment circulation after balances are temporarily cleared.","Journal-entry anomaly detection, which flags unusual individual postings but does not require a distributed local-to-macro interaction pattern.","Aged unreconciled-item reporting, which shows persistence of known differences but not migration through reversals, reclasses, or counterparties.","Root-cause review of one close incident, which explains a selected discrepancy but does not mine recurrence across incidents as a forming system pattern."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The candidate's distinct contribution is to generate reviewable hypotheses about cross-entity loops or migration produced by interacting local correction practices, while preserving the lineage and uncertainty of those practices; it is not merely a better score for individual unusual journals or another report of unmatched balances.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The group controller retains authority over accounting conclusions, control changes, escalation, and financial-statement treatment. A designated audit-analytics lead may run the read-only detector, and the controller-led interpretation panel may classify hypotheses and assign bounded investigations.","authorized_first_step":"Run a read-only retrospective feasibility test on an access-controlled extract from two completed close periods for three consenting entities, using journal and reconciliation metadata already collected for accounting purposes.","excluded_actions":["Posting, reversing, reclassifying, or blocking journal entries","Changing reconciliations, consolidation balances, or financial statements","Treating a flag as evidence of error, fraud, control failure, or employee misconduct","Ranking or evaluating individual employees","Expanding collection to messages, keystrokes, or unrelated behavioral data","Sharing identifiable hypotheses outside the authorized review group","Changing formal controls or escalation thresholds without controller approval"],"halt_rollback":"Stop the test if access controls fail, source lineage cannot be reconstructed, preparer identities cannot be suppressed for initial review, or reviewers begin using hypotheses punitively. Revoke the test extract, remove derived displays and link tables under the approved retention procedure, preserve only an authorized aggregate test record, and revert to existing reconciliation controls."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"A blinded manual review finds that apparent loops are fully explained by documented recurring eliminations, exchange-rate mechanics, system-generated reversals, or known timing conventions, with no unresolved amount migrating among locally initiated corrections.","problem_falsifier":"The proposed problem is falsified if sampled cases reduce to isolated errors or centrally specified recurring processes rather than a macro-pattern arising from interacting local adjustments across entities or periods.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is not supported if the detector cannot reconstruct auditable local-to-macro lineage, if flagged motifs are not distinguishable from ordinary variation under blinded controller review, or if it surfaces no actionable investigation hypothesis beyond existing pairwise and aging controls.","risks":["False positives may divert scarce close-review capacity.","Aggregation may erase local accounting context and encourage incorrect classification.","Reviewers may infer misconduct from a system-level hypothesis.","Teams may alter journal descriptions or routing after learning the detector's features, making it stale or gameable.","Sensitive transaction or workflow metadata may be exposed beyond legitimate accounting purposes.","Attention to detected loops may displace work on known material reconciliation issues.","A response to an early weak signal may interrupt valid local corrections before sufficient evidence exists."]},"next_evidence_step":"For the authorized extract, define one documented baseline class and one candidate motif class before viewing results; generate at most 20 highest-evidence candidate chains; have two controllers independently review de-identified lineage packets against source documentation and existing reconciliation outputs; record agreement, explanations, whether each candidate adds a bounded investigation lead, and any missing context. End after this single retrospective review without operational deployment or control changes.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Not assessed because runtime isolation prohibits inspecting other proposals; this candidate is generated solely from the supplied archetype record and accounting-and-auditing domain card.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}