[Source](https://sheaf.us/audit.html)

What the work requires

# Audit trail and reviewer decisions

Every automatic outcome points back at the human decisions behind it.

## A value walks back to a page

The first half of an audit trail is evidence: any extracted value resolves to a file, a page and a span, and can be opened rather than argued about. That holds for values a person never looked at, which is the point — the trail is not something a reviewer creates by touching a record, it is a property of every value in the system.

## A decision records what it rested on

The second half is provenance. When a person overrules an outcome, what is recorded is not merely the new value but the shape of the disagreement.

- Actor

  Who decided. A person, a workflow, or an agent — recorded as what decided, which is a different question from who was permitted to.
- Proposal

  What the system had suggested before the decision, kept alongside the outcome rather than overwritten by it.
- Scope

  What the decision applies to: this value, this document, or this class of document from this counterparty.
- Departure

  How far the decision moved from the proposal, which is what makes a pattern of corrections visible rather than anecdotal.

## A rule points at the decisions that made it

When the same decision is made a second time and corroborated, it stops being a question and becomes a rule scoped to your organization. That rule is not an opaque preference: it carries the decisions that produced it, so the answer to why did it do that is a list of the times your team did that, with dates and actors.

The distinction

Most systems learn in a direction you cannot inspect and cannot undo. Here, a rule is a record of your own decisions, and it comes back out as easily as it went in.

## Reversible, by design

A rule that cannot be withdrawn is a liability, because the desk that created it changes: a policy is revised, a counterparty is dropped, a reviewer's shortcut turns out to be wrong. Withdrawing a rule restores the prior behaviour and leaves the withdrawal in the record, so the trail explains both why the system used to do something and why it stopped.

## What an auditor can do without asking you

- Take any value in a completed file and open the page it was read from.
- See whether a value was accepted automatically or decided by a person, and which.
- Follow an automatic outcome to the rule behind it, and the rule to the decisions behind that.
- Establish when a behaviour started, because rules carry the date they were promoted.

## Related

**Page-level citations**

**Security and data**

**Knowing what is missing**