VERA-8B: Evidence-Grounded Audit Risk Reasoning from SEC Filings

Structured financial reporting verification requires connecting reported facts to accounting constraints, reconstructing expected values, and executing numerical checks. We study this problem through XBRL numerical consistency verification and introduce AuditFlow, a graph-grounded multi-agent framework built around an executable symbolic environment. The environment links a reusable US-GAAP taxonomy graph with filing-specific XBRL evidence and provides typed tools for retrieval, traversal, computation, and rule evaluation. Two specialized auditors investigate constraints and filing evidence, while a senior auditor coordinates disagreement-triggered refinement. Deterministic tools produce verification evidence; evidential aggregation combines structured reports, including agent-declared overrides, into final decisions. On a newly collected 1{,}000-instance evaluation set of engine-recorded DQC violations, AuditFlow achieves $87.70\%$ joint audit accuracy with Claude Sonnet 4.6, compared with $68.60\%$ for Single Agent and $86.70\%$ for Checker-only. Component and coverage analyses identify executable verification as the main source of accuracy, while additional gains from agent judgment depend on the backbone and checker coverage.

Large language models are increasingly used to support financial operations, but their apparent reasoning performance can depend on whether they receive the right evidence. In financial reconciliation, the evidence needed for diagnosis is distributed across invoices, purchase orders, approvals, allocations, payments, ledger entries, and bank activity, linked by transactional relationships rather than textual similarity. End-to-end accuracy can therefore conflate evidence access with reasoning quality. We introduce FinRCA-Bench, a deterministic synthetic benchmark of 2,250 accounts-payable-to-bank reconciliation cases spanning 14 operational tables, including 1,500 injected failures across 15 causal categories and 750 legitimate or hard-negative cases. Root-cause labels and record-level evidence contracts are hidden from the model, allowing retrieval to be evaluated independently of answer correctness. We compare Rules/SQL, classical machine learning, dense semantic retrieval, deterministic relational expansion, and Typed Provenance Graph Retrieval (TPGR), a typed traversal restricted to persisted transaction relationships. Rules/SQL reaches 84.97% held-out exact accuracy and classical ML reaches 95.44%. Holding the reasoning model, prompt, and generation settings fixed while changing only retrieval increases macro required-record recall from 0.83% to 77.70% and exact 16-class accuracy from 2.05% to 72.44%. Structural retrieval failures outnumber reasoning failures with sufficient retrieval by 95 to 15; 254 correct predictions occur despite incomplete retrieval, and strict returned-evidence contract accuracy is only 5.72%. On FinRCA-Bench, retrieval architecture strongly shapes observed AI-system performance, and a correct root-cause label is a weak proxy for an auditable diagnosis.

Large language models are increasingly used to answer questions over annual reports, earnings decks, and analyst notes, yet their outputs remain difficult to verify in high-stakes financial workflows. A fluent answer can blend directly grounded statements, weak synthesis, and unsupported claims across narrative text, tables, and charts. We present EvidenceLens, a visual analytics prototype that treats financial question answering as a claim-evidence alignment problem. The system decomposes an answer into atomic claims, summarizes support composition and confidence, support gaps, and coordinates claim-level inspection with source passages, table cells, and chart regions. Its core visual representation is a multimodal claim-evidence matrix that makes coverage, contradiction, and modality imbalance immediately visible. To support reproducibility, we also specify a JSON-based artifact schema, a lightweight multimodal alignment pipeline, and a deterministic review-priority ranking that maps backend signals into an auditable visual structure. Through representative report-auditing scenarios, we show how EvidenceLens helps analysts distinguish grounded claims from overconfident synthesis that conventional chat interfaces flatten.