The proof that an agent action is accountable lives in more than one place. That it happened is captured by an agency receipt. That it was authorized is captured by a permit and the grant behind it. Each is signed and verifiable on its own — but they are separate artifacts, in separate systems, produced at separate moments.
To trust the action, a verifier has to find all of them, confirm each one, and confirm that they refer to the same action. Nothing binds them together. The occurrence record does not commit to the authorization; the authorization does not commit to the occurrence. Reconstructing the whole action from scattered evidence is exactly the work an accountability layer should remove.
Attested Actions removes it by making the binding itself the object. The Attested Action Envelope is a single signed record that names the action, names the authority that permitted it, and chains to the agent's previous envelope by hash. One object, one signature, one offline check answers both questions at once: it happened, and it was authorized — and this exact action, not some other one.
It is a layer above the records that capture each part, not a replacement for any of them. It does not judge whether an action was correct or wise, and it does not, on its own, corroborate the subject the action was performed against — establishing whether a counterparty was truly who they claimed is a companion concern, handled by multi-source corroboration (the quilt) and kept deliberately separate. What the envelope owns is the binding: composing an action's own records into one thing you can verify end to end.