FIVE YEARS OF WORK PAPERS
Research
The Constitution is the mission statement. The Preamble is the stated purpose. Every white paper here is a work paper — evidence gathered, sourced, and open to challenge. Nothing on this page is opinion. If a finding doesn't hold up, we want to know.
This research isn't organized around one question. It's organized around four reasons it was undertaken: the book, which documents how the republic itself has changed; AACIF, the governance framework built to hold AI to the same evidentiary standard; the ongoing articles that audit how AI is actually being used right now; and the documentation of private capital moving inside the systems citizens depend on.
The four reasons this research exists
01
The Book
An assessment of the republic itself: what has changed since the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution, and the citizen's long fight to be recognized and empowered within it. This research covers six governance pillars and industry-by-industry documentation of deregulation and capture — airlines, media, pharmaceuticals, financial services, utilities, and more.
02
AACIF
The AI Assertion and Chain Integrity Framework: a control framework requiring consequential AI systems to declare what they knew, on what basis, and for whom — and to carry that declaration across every handoff from construction to audit. This research also feeds a second book, applying the same discipline directly to the risk-and-controls profession.
03
The Articles - AI Apps
This Old Auditor's ongoing, system-by-system audit of AI as it's actually deployed inside institutions right now — not a technology story, but a governance story. Each installment takes one real AI system and asks what it knew, when it knew it, and who was harmed when the record didn't survive the handoff.
04
Private Funds
Documentation of private equity, private credit, and private funds embedding themselves inside the sectors citizens depend on most — healthcare, housing, traffic enforcement, and more — where oversight has not kept pace with how much of daily life these funds now own.
01 - THE BOOK
Six pillars
The book and the six pillars below are built from the same research. Every pillar is a lens on the same finding: fifty years of governance redirected from citizen to capital.
1. Constitutional Drift
The structural migration of authority away from the original constitutional design — not by amendment, not by revolution, but by delegation, normalization, and the slow redirection of incentives. This pillar establishes the standard against which everything else in the research is measured: what the founders built, how the controls were designed to function, and how that design was bypassed.
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2. Executive Power
The expansion, normalization, and operational consequences of executive authority over fifty years. Executive orders that were once administrative tools became policy instruments. Emergency powers became permanent. This pillar documents the transfer of authority upward and outward, away from Congress and away from citizens.
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3. Political Engine
The mechanics that shape congressional behavior — not corruption in the legal sense, but structural capture. Campaign finance dependency. The revolving door between Congress and the industries it regulates. Post-congressional career paths that reward capital service and penalize citizen service. This pillar documents how the incentive architecture was rewired so that serving capital became the path of least resistance.
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4. Citizen vs. Capital
The realignment of who the system actually serves — the pension-to-401(k) transfer, wage stagnation against fifty years of productivity growth, the federal debt ledger citizens fund but don't control. This pillar quantifies what the structural conversion cost American households, and who collected the difference.
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5. Stewardship
The evaluative framework for long-term institutional health, drawn from civilizational research spanning the Althing, the Haudenosaunee, and Aboriginal governance sustained for 60,000 years. Stewardship asks a different question than the other pillars: not what broke and who broke it, but what does governance that lasts actually look like. The framework rests on six pillars of its own: stewardship over control, transparency over performance, participation over representation, regeneration over extraction, decentralization over consolidation, and accountability over legacy.
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6. Government Workforce
Industry research
The dismantling of the federal government's own workforce as a protected, professional, citizen-serving labor force — and what happens when that protection is removed. This pillar documents the erosion of merit-based civil service and the loss of the government worker's role as the last line of defense between citizens and unchecked private and political power.
Deregulation and capture, industry by industry. Each paper follows the same arc: lobby out, consolidate, extract, fail, and hand the bill to the citizen.
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02 — AACIF
The governance framework
Every mature system that delegates consequential work builds in two controls: a declaration before reliance, and a record after it. Aviation does this. Banking does this. Medicine does this. AI is the exception. AACIF requires consequential AI systems to declare what they knew, on what basis, and for whom — across a twelve-layer chain, governed by seven boundary assertions (temporal, knowledge state, population, measurement, language and perspective, translation, and chain integrity).
Alongside the core framework, this research includes honest, self-critical notes that stress-test AACIF against real domain expertise before it goes further — not a defense of the framework, but a map of where it's most vulnerable.
Working Paper
Controls Built In: AACIF and the Missing Black Box for AI Judgment (v8)
Drafted
Research Note
Layer 6 and the Intent Gap: The Deepest Structural Challenge to AACIF
Drafted
Research Note
The Human Layer and the Expectation Gap: Three Ways Layer 10 Fails
Drafted
Research Note
AI Governance Information Flows: Form PF, COT, and Call Reports as the Architecture
Drafted
Research Note
The Perspectives That Are Missing: Who Must Be at the Design Table — and Who Must Not
Drafted
Research Note
The OSI Model as a Governance Architecture for AI: Where the Analogy Holds and Breaks
Drafted
2nd Book
AI Risk and Controls: The Assembly Line Nobody Inspected
In progress
03 — THE ARTICLES
AI Apps
This Old Auditor applies the audit methodology to AI as it's actually deployed, one system at a time. The founding series, Governance Primer, is cross-sectoral by design — it establishes the method across healthcare, hiring, fraud, lending, and congressional process before the series moves into per-industry depth.
Part Zero
The Reading Room — introduction, seven systems, four audit questions
Published
Part One
The Recovery Room — nH Predict / NaviHealth / UnitedHealth
Camera-Ready
Part Two
The Listening Room — DAX Copilot / Epic / Microsoft Nuance
Camera-Ready
Part Three
The Hiring Room — Workday Illuminate / HiredScore
Verifying
Part Four
The Cash Machine — FICO Falcon Fraud Manager
Drafted
Part Five
The Lending Room — Upstart AI Lending
Drafted
Part Six
The Room Where Your Senator Isn't — congressional constituent infrastructure
Camera-Ready
04 — PRIVATE FUNDS
Verticals
This Old Auditor's second track documents private equity, private credit, and private funds embedding themselves inside citizen-critical sectors — one vertical at a time. Healthcare is the first vertical with a dedicated series; the sector map behind this research identifies eleven more.
HEALTHCARE — ACTIVE
Article
The Rule With a Trapdoor in It — the Medical Loss Ratio self-dealing mechanism
Drafted
Article
The Audit That Was Built Not to Bite — Medicare Advantage and the RADV overpayment mechanism
Drafted
Research Brief
Prospect Medical Holdings / Leonard Green & Partners
Research
Article
The Phantom Malpractice Reserve
Drafted
TRAFFIC ENFORCEMENT — NEW
Research Brief
Private Capital in AI Traffic Enforcement — BusPatrol, Obvio, Flock Safety, Roundabout
Research
HOUSING
In progress
The Rent Room — algorithmic rent-setting and institutional consolidation
Research collected
Nine further verticals are identified and scoped, not yet in active production: manufactured housing, utilities and infrastructure, data centers and AI infrastructure, childcare, prison and correctional services, veterinary care, funeral and death care, food and agriculture, insurance and retirement, and government contractors.