Read and audit the reasoning trace

Every agent execution in ThynkTax produces a reasoning trace - a structured log of every step the agent took.

Why traces exist

• Audit defence - when CBDT or CBIC asks "how did this number get computed?", the trace shows every input and every decision.
• Debugging - if an agent produced the wrong answer, the trace shows the exact step where it went wrong.
• Trust - agents do non-trivial reasoning; the trace lets you verify that the reasoning was sound.

Where to find the trace

• Approvals queue - for pending actions, the trace is shown inline
• Agent → Executions - for completed actions, full history with traces
• Audit log - every execution's run ID

Trace structure

Each trace is an ordered list of steps. Each step has:

• step - short identifier (e.g. load_2b, run_rules, build_return)
• note - plain-English description of what happened
• inputs - the data the agent considered at this step
• output - the result of this step (passed to the next step)
• timestamp

Example trace - Validation Agent

1. load_rules: Loaded 200 validation rules for domain=GST
fetch_return: Loaded GSTR-3B draft for period 2026-04, status=PREPARED
run_rules: Executed 200 rules; 0 failures, 2 warnings
severity_counts: {BLOCKER: 0, ERROR: 0, WARN: 2, INFO: 0}
persist: Saved validation result to return.validation_errors

Audit retention

Traces are retained for 10 years - the standard tax-audit retention window. Even after the return itself is archived, the trace remains queryable.