Accounting After Truth: Structural Limits on Forensic Determinacy in Financial Records

Accounting After Truth (working title): Structural Limits on Forensic Determinacy in Financial Records reframes persistent accounting failures—delayed fraud detection, repeated restatements, and irreducible attribution disputes—not as primarily problems of incentives, ethics, or enforcement, but as limits of inference imposed by record architecture. The manuscript’s core move is an “epistemic reversal”: there exist structural conditions under which “truth” in the forensic sense is formally unresolvable, even for an ideal auditor with perfect compliance and unbounded computation, if that auditor is restricted to the observables the system actually records. The paper models accounting as an observable trace system and identifies failure modes that destroy reconstructability at the moment of recording, not at the audit stage—most notably balance-centric aggregation, estimator mutability, record mutability without lineage, and unbounded “repair” that makes learning indistinguishable from concealment. It then states a set of structural impossibility results (e.g., loss of estimator identity implies semantic underdetermination; mutable records imply attribution impossibility; unbounded repair implies concealment indistinguishability), including the stronger claim that even immutable balance-ledgers can remain indeterminate. From these limits, the manuscript derives necessary (not optional) conditions for replay-verifiable accounting: measure-once/compute-forever (estimator pinning), event-native ledgers (events primary, balances as views), immutable lineage (append-only causal preservation), witness-bounded discretion (judgment logged, not eliminated), and bounded repair with enumerability and termination. The contribution is explicitly scoped as epistemic infrastructure—not a fraud-prevention model, not a new standard, and not a governance reform proposal—aimed at specifying what can and cannot be known from conventional financial records. Keywords:: accounting as trace systems; reconstructability; forensic determinacy; identifiability; record lineage; estimator pinning; restatements; audit replay; epistemic limits; immutable ledgers; repair boundedness