A question on Polkadot Treasury reporting: what is considered “canonical” for audits?

Ecosystem Digest
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Hello Polkadot community,

I’ve been reviewing a number of past Treasury proposals and post-mortems, and I keep running into a recurring question that I’m hoping Treasury participants can help clarify.

Polkadot has fully on-chain Treasury execution and OpenGov-based approvals, which is great.
However, when proposals later need to be reviewed, audited, or explained externally, the financial story seems much harder to reconstruct.

In practice, I often see situations where:

  • Multiple wallets are involved over time

  • Spend spans several price regimes

  • USD values differ depending on pricing source and timestamp

  • Different reviewers produce slightly different “total spent” numbers

This leads to a simple but surprisingly hard question:

When there are multiple reasonable ways to reconstruct Treasury spending, what does the DAO consider the “canonical” financial view?

Some concrete questions I’d love input on:

  1. For Treasury-funded teams:

    • What financial artifacts were you actually asked to produce after funds were spent?

  2. For Treasury reviewers:

    • When two analyses disagree, how do you decide which one to trust?

  3. For auditors / accountants:

    • What usually causes the most back-and-forth during Polkadot-related audits?

I’m not proposing a solution here — I’m trying to understand how the ecosystem currently resolves these ambiguities, or whether they’re simply accepted as part of on-chain systems today.

Any concrete experiences (even “this was painful”) would be extremely helpful.

Thanks in advance.

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