Compliance Minimisation Hypothesis (CMH): Definition, Empirical Tests, and Cross-Domain Pattern — Priority Record v1.0

This working paper establishes a timestamped priority record for the Compliance Minimisation Hypothesis (CMH), formulated by Hon Bor So in January 2026 as part of a research programme on decision-level accountability in human–AI systems. The CMH states: in the absence of a measurable quality standard, organisations subject to mandatory reporting requirements will produce documentation that satisfies the formal obligation while minimising accountability-relevant content. This tendency is architecture-conditioned rather than operator-specific — it follows from the representational structure of the reporting framework, not from the behaviour of individual filers. The document contains: (1) the full hypothesis statement and falsifiability conditions; (2) the theoretical grounding in Transparent Boundary Theory (TBT) and the LumenFold Protocol (LFP-0); (3) a cross-domain summary of three empirical tests conducted to date — California DMV autonomous vehicle disengagement corpus (N = 2,500; BTI range 2.56–8.25/12; slope = 0.047/year, p = .668), DMV vs NHTSA SGO cross-framework comparison (N = 2,889; Waymo BTI 3.86 vs 9.61; t(540) = 24.17, p < .001, d = 3.29), and CFPB credit card complaints (N = 25,000; card issuers M = 6.89 vs credit bureaus M = 4.62; t = 50.49, p < .001, d = 0.99); (4) the measurement instrument (Boundary Transparency Index, BTI; ICC(2,1) = 0.837); and (5) a formal priority and provenance statement. This record is deposited to establish authorship and date of formulation independently of the journal peer-review timeline. A related manuscript was submitted to Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives (TRIP-D-26-00529) as of April 2026. Related Zenodo records: LFP-0 (10.5281/zenodo.17900999), BTI Rater Pack (10.5281/zenodo.18989054), Programme Statement v1.0 (10.5281/zenodo.19210802), Paper C preprint (10.5281/zenodo.19078612). Indexed in the project Root Index (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17992916).Author: Hon Bor So ORCID: 0009-0008-2768-7494Author note: The author also publishes under the name Sing So (Chöndrel Dorje).