Auditable by Construction: An Ontology-Driven Framework for Trustworthy LLM Analytics in Enterprise Finance

Abstract

Enterprise adoption of large language models in finance is constrained less by fluency than by trust: in Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) and other regulated workflows, an answer is usable only if it is traceable to authoritative sources and auditable after the fact. This paper argues that retrieval-augmented generation for enterprise finance should be evaluated on auditability alongside accuracy, and presents the Knowledge-Driven Analytics Framework (KDAF), which builds ontology-driven knowledge systems through six iterative stages and retrieves evidence via Context-Aware Relevance Propagation (CARP), so that every retrieved fact carries its relationship type, confidence, and source lineage. An evaluation on FinanceBench (145 questions) compares KDAF against zero-context inference, BM25, concept-weighted lexical retrieval, and ungrounded graph traversal. First, retrieval is necessary: zero-context inference reaches 4.1% correctness against 10-12% for retrieval-augmented conditions. Second, on answer correctness the retrieval conditions are statistically indistinguishable (KDAF vs BM25: -0.007, 95% CI [-0.021, 0.000]), so accuracy alone does not justify structured retrieval here -- a negative result we report explicitly. Third, on auditability the ordering reverses: KDAF attains the highest citation traceability F1 (0.515), exceeding ungrounded traversal by +0.027 (CI [0.006, 0.050]) and BM25 by +0.052 (CI [0.024, 0.083]), intervals excluding zero. Graph-structured retrieval also admits no evidence from outside the question subject entity (0 of 426 items, against 16.8% and 20.2% for lexical baselines), and every selected item resolves to a complete provenance chain. We argue that auditability, not accuracy, is the axis on which ontology-grounded retrieval earns its cost.