{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp09_archetype_breadth150_20260804","cell_id":"load_shedding__accounting_auditing","arm":"BREADTH_PROBE_ONE_SHOT","candidate_id":"load_shedding__accounting_auditing__P1","proposal_index":1,"version":0,"title":"Close-Window Journal Admission Shedding","problem":"Near a financial-reporting ledger lock, late manual journal entries and reconciliation adjustments can require more review time than the controllership team has left. If every submission remains in the current-close queue, reviewers may spend scarce capacity on duplicates, superseded entries, and deferrable presentation refinements while material corrections, cutoff entries, consolidation entries, or fraud-sensitive journals wait or receive rushed review.","actors":["Corporate controller","Close manager","Journal preparers","Journal-entry reviewers and approvers","Account and entity owners","Internal control owner","Financial reporting team","Internal or external auditors as independent challengers"],"observable_state":"At a scheduled checkpoint before ledger lock, estimated review minutes for pending and forecast late journals exceed available reviewer minutes after preserving a defined emergency reserve; the queue contains distinguishable protected, rejectable, and safely deferrable classes. Observable indicators include queue age by class, remaining review capacity, duplicate or superseded submissions, cumulative value of proposed deferrals, protected-entry wait time, and the disposition of every submitted journal.","consequence":"Continuing to retain all journals in the live close queue can consume the remaining review capacity, delay or compress scrutiny of reporting-critical entries, increase the chance of approval errors, and leave insufficient headroom for newly discovered material issues before filing.","affected_objective":"Complete materially accurate, policy-compliant financial reporting on schedule while preserving review quality, auditability, and capacity for late-emerging reporting-critical entries.","intervention":"Install a controller-governed admission boundary for manual journals during the final close window. Trigger shedding when estimated remaining review demand exceeds 85% of remaining reviewer capacity, thereby reserving 15% for protected late discoveries; return to normal admission only after demand remains below 65% at two consecutive checkpoints. Protect journals involving a known or possible material misstatement, statutory or tax obligations, consolidation and elimination, cutoff, cash, payroll, related parties, fraud indicators, or other policy-defined high-risk conditions. Cleanly reject duplicate and superseded submissions. Defer only elective allocation refinements or presentation-only reclassifications whose non-posting in the current period has been documented as acceptable under the reporting basis and control policy, whose individual and cumulative amounts remain below controller-approved limits, and whose deferral creates an owned next-close item with an expiry. Record the classification, reason, approver, amount, affected accounts, and final disposition for every shed item; prohibit silent deletion and review cumulative deferrals before ledger lock.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Capacity-constrained system under overload","domain_realization":"The journal-review function has fewer reviewer minutes remaining than the estimated work attached to the late-close journal queue."},{"archetype_element":"Distinguishable load classes","domain_realization":"Manual journals are classified as protected reporting-critical work, cleanly rejectable duplicates or superseded submissions, or policy-permitted deferrable refinements."},{"archetype_element":"Overload threshold","domain_realization":"The gate activates when estimated review demand exceeds 85% of remaining reviewer capacity and retains a 15% critical-capacity reserve."},{"archetype_element":"Admission boundary","domain_realization":"A final-close journal intake gate assigns an explicit current-close, reject, or defer disposition before a submission consumes reviewer capacity."},{"archetype_element":"Selective sacrifice","domain_realization":"Duplicates are rejected and eligible low-consequence refinements are removed from the current close rather than merely moved behind protected journals."},{"archetype_element":"Explicit handling of shed load","domain_realization":"Rejected journals receive a recorded reason; deferred journals receive an owner, next-close destination, cumulative-limit check, and expiry."},{"archetype_element":"Observability and auditability","domain_realization":"A disposition register exposes trigger state, classification, amounts, approvers, protected queue performance, deferrals, and reentry."},{"archetype_element":"Recovery with hysteresis","domain_realization":"Ordinary admission resumes only after demand stays below 65% at two checkpoints, reducing repeated shedding and readmission near the trigger."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"admission_control","role":"Places the shedding decision before a late journal consumes scarce review capacity.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the admission gate, all submissions enter the same live queue and lower-priority work can consume the protected reserve."},{"mechanism_slug":"selective_rejection","role":"Cleanly rejects duplicate or superseded journals and explicitly defers narrowly eligible refinements.","counterfactual_removal":"If work is only reordered, total close-window demand remains above capacity and the intervention collapses into prioritization rather than load shedding."},{"mechanism_slug":"priority_based_dropping","role":"Protects reporting-critical classes while removing only policy-defined expendable work from the current close.","counterfactual_removal":"Undifferentiated dropping could remove critical corrections and become arbitrary denial."},{"mechanism_slug":"critical_capacity_reserve","role":"Keeps a fixed share of remaining reviewer time available for material issues discovered late in the close.","counterfactual_removal":"The accepted queue could still saturate all review capacity, leaving no headroom for protected late discoveries."},{"mechanism_slug":"hysteresis_band","role":"Uses separate activation and recovery thresholds to limit oscillatory shedding.","counterfactual_removal":"Journals could repeatedly move between admitted and deferred states as workload estimates fluctuate near one threshold."}],"causal_chain":["Late-close journal review demand is estimated against remaining staffed review capacity.","When demand crosses the activation threshold, the intake boundary classifies every new and pending submission using controller-approved risk and deferrability rules.","Protected journals remain admitted; duplicates and superseded journals are rejected; narrowly eligible refinements are explicitly removed from the current close and assigned bounded reentry.","Removing expendable work reduces the live queue instead of transferring all excess work into an invisible close-window backlog.","The reserved reviewer capacity remains available for material corrections, high-risk journals, and late discoveries.","Recorded reasons, cumulative-amount checks, ownership, and expiry make sacrifice inspectable and constrain misclassification or permanent starvation.","After workload remains below the recovery threshold, ordinary admission resumes and deferred items reenter through the documented next-close process."],"baseline":"The close team retains nearly every submitted journal in one current-period queue, works it approximately by arrival with manual escalations for urgent items, and responds to overload through overtime, informal reprioritization, or rushed approvals. Lower-priority entries may wait, but they are not explicitly removed with bounded disposition and recovery rules.","nearest_rivals":["Risk-based prioritization alone: reviews critical journals first but leaves all lower-priority journals consuming current-close queue and coordination capacity.","Buffering: moves excess journals into a holding queue without deciding that they will not be processed in the current close, risking a hidden backlog.","Rate limiting: caps how quickly preparers may submit journals but does not selectively sacrifice already pending or newly arriving low-priority work when aggregate demand exceeds capacity.","Additional reviewers or overtime: expands capacity rather than converting overload into controlled sacrifice and may be unavailable or introduce handoff and competence constraints.","Earlier hard close deadline: rejects work by time alone rather than reserving capacity through explicit risk, accounting, and fairness criteria."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The structural distinction is the explicit removal of policy-eligible journals from the current close after a measurable overload trigger, coupled with a protected review-capacity reserve and auditable reject-or-reentry dispositions. Merely ranking every journal, slowing intake, or accumulating a later queue would not instantiate this candidate.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The corporate controller owns activation and journal-class policy within the reporting basis and internal-control framework. A designated control owner performs independent review of classifications and cumulative deferrals; auditors may challenge accounting judgments but do not operate the gate.","authorized_first_step":"Authorize only a retrospective shadow replay of one completed close using preserved timestamps, journal metadata, review-time estimates, and final dispositions; do not alter the ledger or prior approvals.","excluded_actions":["Deferring or rejecting any journal that could affect a known or possible material misstatement","Deferring statutory, tax, covenant, consolidation, cutoff, cash, payroll, related-party, fraud-indicator, or policy-defined high-risk entries","Treating quantitative size alone as proof that an error is immaterial","Changing accounting judgments, audit scope, filing obligations, segregation of duties, or approval requirements","Silently deleting an accepted journal or moving it to an unowned backlog","Allowing preparers to self-assign protected status without review","Making live ledger changes during the first evidence step"],"halt_rollback":"Stop the shadow test if any known reporting-critical journal is classified for shedding, if cumulative deferrals breach the preapproved limit, if required metadata cannot support an auditable disposition, or if impacts cannot be examined by entity and preparer class. Because the first step is read-only, rollback consists of discarding simulated classifications while preserving the original close record unchanged."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"A timestamped reconstruction shows that protected journals already received adequate, timely review with unused capacity during apparent queue peaks, or that review overload was driven by missing source data or a correctness defect rather than excess journal volume.","problem_falsifier":"The problem is falsified for the tested close if estimated and observed review demand never exceeds safely available capacity, critical entries do not wait behind lower-priority work, and no loss of emergency review headroom occurs.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is falsified if the shadow replay does not reduce current-close review demand or preserve the defined reserve, if any shed journal should have remained in the current period under the reporting basis, if deferred work lacks bounded ownership and reentry, or if protected wait time is unchanged because another bottleneck controls completion.","risks":["A quantitatively small journal may have qualitatively material implications and be shed incorrectly.","Preparers may split entries or claim protected labels to evade the gate.","Repeated deferral may normalize incomplete cleanup or starve particular entities and accounts.","Cumulative individually small deferrals may become material or conceal a trend.","Estimated review minutes may be inaccurate and trigger shedding too early or too late.","Sacrifice may fall disproportionately on teams with later source-system availability.","The policy may mask chronic staffing, process-design, or source-data deficiencies.","Separate activation and recovery thresholds may still be insufficient to prevent unstable classification.","Stakeholders may interpret explicit rejection as permission to weaken accounting completeness."]},"next_evidence_step":"Replay one completed month-end or quarter-end close in shadow mode. Before replay, have the controller and independent control owner freeze protected classes, deferrable criteria, cumulative limits, capacity-estimation method, 85% activation threshold, 15% reserve, and 65% two-checkpoint recovery rule. Process submissions in original timestamp order and record which journals would be admitted, rejected, or deferred; simulated reviewer demand; protected-entry wait time; reserve availability; wrong-shed cases identified from final accounting conclusions; cumulative deferrals; ownership completeness; and distribution by entity and preparer class. The bounded result is a feasibility and falsification record, not a live policy change or effect-size estimate.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Not assessed against other proposals because runtime isolation prohibits inspecting them; this candidate is independently derived from the supplied load-shedding archetype and accounting-and-auditing domain card.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}