Every decision, on the record.
What gets logged
For every application, the log captures the full chain of reasoning that produced the final decision. That includes the AI's per-criterion score with its evidence citation, every reviewer's score with whatever comment they wrote, every reviewer override of the AI with the reason they gave, every panel-meeting note tagged to the application, and the final decision with the decision-maker's identity.
The log also captures what didn't happen. If a reviewer was assigned an application and never opened it, that's logged. If an applicant was excluded from a shortlist for a conflict-of-interest reason, the routing decision and the COI declaration are both in the log.
How the log behaves
Append-only
Log entries can't be edited after the fact. If a decision needs to be corrected, the correction is a new log entry that references the original. Both stay on the record. The before-and-after is always visible.
Tamper-evident
Each log entry is hashed and linked to the previous one in the same programme. Any attempt to silently alter an old entry breaks the chain, and the break is visible in the audit view.
Retained for the regulatory period
Default retention is seven years from final decision, which covers NDPR (Nigeria), POPIA (South Africa), and the Kenya and Ghana DPAs. Longer custom retention is available; shorter is not, because the regulators don't allow it.
Who can see what
The full audit log is visible to organisation administrators and programme owners. Individual reviewers see only their own actions and the panel-level summary, not other reviewers' comments mid-cycle (which would compromise independent judgment).
Applicants don't see the raw log. After a decision, they get a written reason generated from the log entries that pertain to their application, with reviewer identities anonymised. If they escalate the decision, the full log entries for their application can be released to an external reviewer (a board chair, an ombudsman, a regulator) without disclosing the rest of the cohort.
What the log won't do for you
It doesn't make bad decisions defensible. An audit trail of a sloppy reasoning process gives you a detailed record of a sloppy reasoning process. The log raises the floor on accountability; the floor is still made of the same reviewers reading the same applications.
It doesn't replace your records-retention policy. The log is a system of record for what happened inside FairLens. If your organisation also keeps paper minutes, email threads, or board-pack PDFs from the decision meeting, those still live where they live. The FairLens log references them by ID where supplied, but doesn't pull them in.
It doesn't expose data we shouldn't hold. Demographic fields the application form doesn't collect aren't inferred and aren't logged. The log is a record of decisions, not a profile of applicants. See the bias reports page for the boundary between what we measure and what we don't.
Want to see a sample audit trail end-to-end?