Claim Standing and Legitimacy

Claims often fail not because they are false, but because they are not yet well-formed objects of responsible assertion: their target drifts, their support carrier is unfixed, their evidence is proxy-contaminated, or their reported status exceeds what the audit supports. This paper develops the Universal Exactness Audit Protocol (UEAP) as a domain-general protocol for assigning the strongest responsible status of a claim. The main result is status-relative. For a domain D, claim c, and requested status class σ, UEAP-legitimacy at σ is certified exactly when target fixation, carrier adequacy, exhaustion of admissible alternatives modulo skin, laundering exclusion, and report-preserving output all hold: UEAPLegitσ D(c) ⇐⇒ TargetFixD(c) ∧ CarrierStandσ D(c) ∧ Exhaustσ D(AdmAlt(c)/∼Skin) ∧ NoLaunderD(c) ∧ Reportσ D(c). The paper proves this as a protocol-level result from a pre-audit observation frame and a coordinateexhaustion theorem: any status-relevant claim variation must appear in target, carrier, semantic content, representation, ancestry, domain, evidence network, report/use profile, or requested status class. The manuscript gives the formal audit objects, validator, registry, status-precedence rule, laundering taxonomy, and deployment manuals. Three worked audits demonstrate the protocol: Black–Scholes valuation as representative-invariant local valuation, self-adjoint extension as endpoint selection versus auxiliary-data import, and cosmological transport closure as disciplined numerical reportability. UEAP is not a truth oracle and does not replace domain expertise; it classifies standing, blockers, and reportability so that claims are not promoted beyond what their carrier and ledger support.