Accountability
The identification, before the fact, of the named person who answers for a system's consequences — and who has both the authority and the information to have prevented them.
Why it matters
Applies to an individual. Not a function, not a committee, not the vendor. It bites at the moment of loss, and the question is always asked in the past tense, which is why designating afterward does not work. It fails through distribution: when responsibility is shared across model developers, platform operators, data vendors and the deploying institution, each can point to another and the answer is nobody. Liability does not distribute itself across a stack, and no published framework resolves this for cross-vendor agent chains.
What it is not
These are routinely confused with Accountability. The distinctions are not pedantic — each one has consequences for how a system is governed.
Responsibility can be shared. Accountability is singular by construction — if two people are accountable, neither is.
Liability is the legal consequence, allocated by contract and law. Accountability is the governance designation, and it can sit with someone who bears no legal liability at all.
Relationships
Typed edges into the rest of the ontology. These are what make the canon traversable rather than merely readable.
| Verb | Target | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
addresses | Accountability | The subject speaks to the object as a question or concern. |
relatedTo | Fiduciary duty | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
relatedTo | Agent Identity | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
Record
| Canonical identifier | QIS-TERM-00029 |
| Status | Canonical industry term |
| Adoption | Widely used |
| Domain · Layer | MARQUE questions · Governance |
| Origin | MARQUE question 05. Central to IMDA's agentic framework, which frames it as meaningful human accountability. |
| Semantic aliases | None recorded. |
| First published | 2026-08-02 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-02 · 180-day cycle |
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