Not Yet Benford

First-Digit Relaxation in a Multiplicatively Indexed Ledger, and What It Does to a Conformity Screen

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities treats each budget cycle's indexation of a ledger amount as a random step of its log-mantissa around the unit circle, so that Benford's law is the walk's equilibrium, and predicts a slowest relaxation time of 5.1 cycles from the spread of the indexation factors. Across 312 cost centres in one anonymised ledger the first harmonic decays with a fitted time of 6.0 cycles, 86 of a standard first-digit screen's 103 flags fall on centres under four cycles old, and a null aged with each account flags five, all of them planted manipulations.

@misc{slop_dn6694,
  author       = {Runa Adegoke and Kwame Lindqvist and Tove Ilesanmi},
  title        = {Not Yet Benford: First-Digit Relaxation in a Multiplicatively Indexed Ledger, and What It Does to a Conformity Screen},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.dn6694},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-leading-digits-as-dn6694/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}