{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp09_archetype_breadth150_20260804","cell_id":"representation_independent_interface_contract__accounting_auditing","arm":"BREADTH_PROBE_ONE_SHOT","candidate_id":"representation_independent_interface_contract__accounting_auditing__P1","proposal_index":1,"version":0,"title":"Black-Box Substitution Contract for Three-Way-Match Controls","problem":"During an ERP or accounts-payable service migration, a replacement three-way-match control may be labeled equivalent to the legacy control because it accepts purchase orders, receipts, and invoices and agrees on ordinary examples. Auditors and control owners, however, may depend on undocumented legacy behavior for tolerance rounding, partial receipts, duplicate invoices, currency conversion, amendments, overrides, and processing errors. Configuration descriptions expose implementation details but do not establish whether the replacement preserves the control's observable behavior across transaction sequences.","actors":["Accounts-payable control owner","Accounts-payable processors","ERP implementation team or service provider","Internal audit","External audit","Financial controller"],"observable_state":"Legacy and replacement implementations process the same edge-case transaction sequence but produce different approve, hold, reject, or override states; different reason classifications; or different posting and audit-trail side effects. Review artifacts describe rule tables, workflow screens, or code rather than a shared set of behavioral obligations, leaving reviewers unable to determine which differences invalidate substitution.","consequence":"An unsupported invoice could become eligible for posting, a valid invoice could remain blocked, override evidence could be lost, or auditors could decline to rely on the automated control after migration because behavioral equivalence has not been demonstrated.","affected_objective":"Preserve the three-way-match control objective and auditable evidence while allowing its ERP, rules engine, workflow, or service implementation to change.","intervention":"Define the three-way-match control as an opaque, stateful component whose public contract specifies accepted transaction events; approve, hold, reject, and override outcomes; permitted state transitions; tolerance and precision semantics; duplicate and missing-document behavior; error handling; required audit-trail outputs; and posting side-effect limits. Treat rule storage, database layout, workflow routing, and algorithm choice as hidden representations. Apply one black-box conformance suite to the legacy and replacement implementations, and permit substitution only when the replacement satisfies every mandatory behavioral property within the declared transaction and currency envelope.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"abstract_component_boundary","domain_realization":"The bounded component is the three-way-match control between procurement evidence and authorization of an invoice for posting."},{"archetype_element":"observable_operation_surface","domain_realization":"Public operations include submit, amend, void, evaluate, query status, and record an authorized override; observable outputs include decision state, reason class, and audit-trail event."},{"archetype_element":"abstract_state_model","domain_realization":"An invoice moves among incomplete, pending evaluation, held, approved, rejected, overridden, voided, and posted states under explicitly allowed transitions."},{"archetype_element":"representation_hiding_boundary","domain_realization":"ERP tables, rule-engine syntax, workflow queues, matching algorithms, and whether a step is automated or manually serviced remain non-contractual."},{"archetype_element":"representation_invariant","domain_realization":"No invoice becomes posting-eligible without a conforming match or an authorized, attributable override; replaying the same unchanged event does not create a second authorization."},{"archetype_element":"edge_case_and_error_policy","domain_realization":"The contract specifies behavior for partial receipts, tolerance boundaries, rounding, currency conversion, duplicates, missing documents, reversals, unavailable dependencies, and malformed events."},{"archetype_element":"conformance_oracle","domain_realization":"A sandbox suite supplies transaction-event sequences and checks resulting states, reason classes, audit records, and forbidden side effects without inspecting internal configuration."},{"archetype_element":"substitutability_acceptance_rule","domain_realization":"The replacement may assume the control role only if it passes all mandatory properties for the agreed context envelope and every deviation is either corrected or governed as a contract change."},{"archetype_element":"observable_leakage_watchlist","domain_realization":"The review tracks undocumented dependencies on reason wording, evaluation order, timestamps, screen fields, report row order, and legacy tolerance quirks."},{"archetype_element":"versioned_contract_record","domain_realization":"Changes to decision semantics, state transitions, error behavior, or side effects require a versioned contract update and client-impact review."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"abstract_data_type_specification","role":"Express the control through operations, states, transition laws, invariants, and errors rather than ERP configuration steps.","counterfactual_removal":"Without an abstract specification, reviewers would compare implementations or screenshots and could not distinguish contractual behavior from local design."},{"mechanism_slug":"property_based_conformance_test","role":"Generate transaction sequences around tolerance boundaries, document ordering, amendments, duplicates, and reversals, then verify invariants across both implementations.","counterfactual_removal":"Without property-based cases, common-path examples could pass while sequence-dependent or boundary behavior remained untested."},{"mechanism_slug":"black_box_contract_test_suite","role":"Serve as the common behavioral oracle for legacy and replacement controls while keeping their internal representations outside the acceptance criterion.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a shared black-box oracle, substitution would rest on provider assertions, configuration comparison, or implementation-specific tests."},{"mechanism_slug":"representation_leakage_probe","role":"Identify observable legacy details that processors, reports, or audit procedures may have converted into unofficial dependencies.","counterfactual_removal":"Without leakage probing, migration could unknowingly change behavior that downstream users rely on even though it was absent from formal documentation."},{"mechanism_slug":"substitutability_trial_or_canary","role":"Run the replacement on non-posting sandbox cases and compare its contract-level outcomes before granting it the production control role.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a bounded substitution trial, the first meaningful test of equivalence could occur through production transactions."}],"causal_chain":["Migration creates two implementations that nominally perform the same three-way-match control.","A representation-independent contract converts the control objective into observable operations, state transitions, invariants, errors, and side-effect limits.","Hidden configuration and workflow differences cease to be acceptance criteria unless they affect the defined surface.","One black-box oracle exercises ordinary, boundary, error, and multi-event transaction cases against each implementation.","Property failures reveal behavioral divergence, while leakage probes reveal undocumented dependencies on legacy observables.","Control owners classify each divergence as a defect, a deliberately versioned contract change, or non-contractual internal variation.","Only an implementation satisfying the accepted behavioral contract is eligible to substitute for the legacy control.","Downstream procedures can depend on the versioned behavioral surface while implementation teams retain freedom to change internal representation."],"baseline":"Migration assurance is based on control narratives, configuration walkthroughs, screenshots, a small set of happy-path user-acceptance cases, and selected parallel-run comparisons. These artifacts may show how each system works but do not provide a shared stateful behavioral contract or a reusable substitution rule.","nearest_rivals":["A conventional three-way-match policy or control narrative that states responsibilities but leaves edge-case behavior and state transitions implicit.","ERP configuration comparison that checks whether rule tables and workflow settings resemble the legacy system.","Record-by-record parallel reconciliation that compares a finite transaction sample without specifying general behavioral laws.","Audit re-performance focused on selected transactions rather than qualification of the replacement as a substitutable control component."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The candidate's distinctive claim is that migration acceptance should depend on a versioned, representation-independent behavioral contract and common black-box conformance oracle, not on identical configuration, workflow, or sampled outputs. Internal implementations may differ materially while remaining substitutable, whereas any violation of a mandatory surface property blocks substitution even when configurations appear similar.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The financial controller and designated accounts-payable control owner approve the behavioral contract and production control change; the ERP system owner authorizes deployment; internal and external auditors independently determine whether the evidence supports their planned reliance.","authorized_first_step":"Authorize only an offline sandbox evaluation using synthetic transactions and read-only copies of relevant rule definitions; the exercise may document mismatches but may not alter production decisions or postings.","excluded_actions":["Posting or releasing production invoices through the experimental contract suite","Changing production tolerances, approval authorities, override permissions, or workflow states","Treating black-box conformance as a replacement for required access-control, change-management, cybersecurity, or white-box assurance","Claiming that a passing pilot establishes audit reliance or certifies the replacement","Using real vendor or employee identifiers where synthetic identifiers suffice"],"halt_rollback":"Stop the trial if any test can reach a production posting interface, expose restricted financial data, or mutate a source record. Disable the sandbox integration, discard generated test records under the approved retention procedure, and retain only the reviewed contract, test definitions, and incident log."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"If audit reliance actually depends on implementation-specific controls such as segregation of duties embedded in workflow roles, privileged-access restrictions, or certified calculation code that cannot be observed at the proposed surface, black-box behavioral equivalence alone is insufficient for substitution.","problem_falsifier":"The problem is falsified if existing migration governance already defines and versions complete operations, state transitions, invariants, edge cases, errors, and side-effect limits and applies the same black-box oracle to every candidate implementation, with no material client dependence on hidden details.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is falsified if implementations that pass the agreed suite still violate a mandatory control invariant within the declared envelope, or if reviewers cannot specify expected behavior without encoding one implementation's configuration as the contract.","risks":["An incomplete contract may legitimize implementations that share the tested surface but fail on omitted transaction sequences.","Synthetic cases may omit production-specific combinations of currency, tax, receipt, amendment, and timing conditions.","Freezing accidental legacy behavior into the contract may preserve defects and obstruct improvement.","Normalizing outputs may conceal evidence that auditors need to investigate implementation-specific control failures.","Vendors or control owners may shape the context envelope to exclude difficult cases.","A behavioral contract may be misrepresented as sufficient assurance despite unresolved access, change-management, or data-integrity risks."]},"next_evidence_step":"In an isolated non-posting sandbox, have the control owner and one audit representative specify 24 synthetic transaction sequences covering ordinary matches, both sides of tolerance boundaries, rounding, partial receipts, duplicates, amendments, reversals, missing evidence, dependency failure, and authorized override. Freeze expected states, reason classes, audit events, and forbidden side effects before execution; run the same cases against the legacy and replacement interfaces; then produce a mismatch and leakage log. The step ends with classification of the observed differences and does not authorize remediation or deployment.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"No comparison with other proposals was performed under runtime isolation; this candidate is confined to behavioral substitution of a stateful accounts-payable control across implementation changes.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Initial one-shot breadth-probe candidate generated from the supplied archetype and domain card."],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}