Can FLRW Pass the Audit? A Governance Taxonomy of Stage Audits vs Inter-Sector Closure.

Model-independent consistency tests have become a rapidly growing literature in late-time cosmology, yet the field remains fragmented by an implicit conflation between fundamentally different objectives. In particular, tests designed to audit the geometric stage of the Universe (FLRW integrity tests) are often discussed on equal footing with closure tests that operate downstream at the level of inter-sector relations between background, relativistic perturbations, and structure growth. This work proposes a governance taxonomy that separates stage audits from closure criteria and clarifies their logical roles, failure modes, and data requirements. Within this taxonomy, the HERACLES program is identified as a downstream closure suite that integrates three independent criteria: a background consistency test (C1), a relativistic matterlight closure test (C2), and a growth-sector universality audit (C3). The growth criterion is now hard-audited using a redundancy-controlled 32-point compilation of fσ8(z) measurements, with maximal-power robustness at N = 63 and conservative intra-dataset correlation stress tests. Within the registered drift/step alternative family, no statistically decisive evidence for growth modulation is found, yielding C3 = PASS (hard-consistency) under the pre-registered decisiveness threshold of the governance protocol. This paper provides a unified map of the consistency-test landscape and argues that downstream closure offers a complementary route to falsifiable inference: once stage integrity is established, inter-sector closure becomes a operational consistency framework—within the registered alternative family and available statistical power—for constraining where late-time extensions of the standard model can reside without disrupting sectors already observationally closed.