Institutional Layer Separation in GovTech: Preserving Public Accountability Under Distributed Digital Execution

Abstract Government agencies increasingly rely on GovTech ecosystems, digital platforms, contractors, startups, and artificial intelligence systems to support policy implementation, administrative operations, and public service delivery. While these arrangements can expand innovation and governance capacity, they also create new challenges for public accountability, digital sovereignty, vendor dependence, and the preservation of legitimate public authority. Existing GovTech and AI governance frameworks frequently emphasize transparency, explainability, traceability, and risk management but often provide limited guidance regarding where authority should reside when execution becomes distributed across public, private, civic, and technological actors. This article introduces Institutional Layer Separation (ILS) as a governance design framework for preserving public accountability under distributed digital execution. The framework distinguishes between authority, decision and approval, execution, infrastructure, and accountability layers, specifying how authority may remain publicly governable even when execution is delegated to external providers, automated systems, or artificial intelligence tools. The model further distinguishes traceability from accountability, arguing that identifying what occurred is insufficient unless institutions can also identify who possessed legitimate authority to authorize, approve, oversee, and correct the action. The article develops authority mapping as an operational governance mechanism and identifies governance capacity—including monitoring, auditing, override capability, boundary enforcement, and institutional memory—as a critical condition for maintaining accountability in GovTech environments. Applications are discussed across permitting systems, benefits administration, procurement, policy analysis, and AI-assisted public-sector decision support. The article contributes to digital government and GovTech scholarship by providing a governance-design framework that specifies where authority resides, where execution occurs, and how public accountability can be preserved when government increasingly relies on distributed digital execution.