The Auditability Axiom: A Constitutive Constraint on Delegated Authority

The accountability and delegation literatures in regulatory governance describe accountability mechanisms inconsiderable detail but do not identify the constitutive precondition that makes those mechanisms possible.Principal-agent theory presupposes that a verification pathway exists but does not explain why its destruction bythe agent is normatively impermissible rather than merely strategically costly. This paper formulates theAuditability Axiom — the principle that authority does not include the power to make itself unreviewable — as aconstitutive meta-constraint on delegated authority. The axiom is logically prior to principal-agent theory andgenerates specific institutional requirements as deductive consequences rather than ad hoc reforms. Drawing ondelegation theory, fiduciary law, spoliation doctrine, and constitutive theories of governance, the paper establishesthat the preservation of reviewability is a definitional limit on legitimate delegated authority, derives a non-self-certification principle (the authority-holder must not exclusively control the sole evidentiary pathway thatcertifies its own legitimacy), and shows that governance institutions including independent audit, separation ofduties, tamper-resistant records, adverse inference upon evidence destruction, and whistleblower protectionfollow from a single foundational principle. The framework is applied to public regulation, AI governance, andtransnational regulatory bodies.