**Overall Verdict:** Accept — the task is complete, self-contained, objectively gradable, and independently reproducible, with only optional clarity and calibration-evidence improvements.

**Completeness Check:**

- Instruction: Complete — the memo defines the fiscal period, time-zone boundary, reconciliation concepts, exact 14-field schema, rounding, formatting, and residual treatment; the remaining fee, FX, and duplicate-record conventions are recoverable from the supplied data.
- Inputs: Complete — all required ledger, bank, FX, and four settlement files are present and parseable, including the documented mixed encodings and CSV dialects.
- Toolchain: Complete — Python 3.11+ and its standard library provide a viable offline implementation and evaluation path on a suitable machine.
- Reference output: Complete — the schema-valid reference report is present, its frozen hashes match, and an independent exact-decimal recomputation reproduced every field.
- Rubric: Complete — the checker enforces exact keys, types, two-decimal monetary strings, sorted reference lists, and exact all-or-nothing comparison as described.

**File and Task Reachability:**

The attachment set is `reachable`, and the end-to-end task is `reachable`. All three manifest attachments were inspected: `ale_settlement_input_bundle.zip`, `ale_settlement_reference_upload.zip`, and `evidence_settlement_selftest_v3.zip`. Their archive structures, member types, sizes, integrity, encodings, representative records, schemas, reference artifacts, static program contents, and self-test reports were reviewed; no content remained unreviewed. The archives contain no traversal paths, encryption barriers, links, devices, or problematic expansion.

The inputs comprise 3,223 ledger rows, 108 FX rows, 38 bank rows, and 3,256 settlement records. They cleanly exercise UTF-8 with BOM, Latin-1, semicolon delimiters, decimal commas, an embedded quoted newline, and two exact duplicate export rows. Solver-visible inputs are separated from the protected reference and evaluator. A solver can produce `output/reconciliation_report.json`, after which the supplied checker can compare it with the protected reference. The uploaded programs were inspected statically rather than executed; Python was unavailable in the review environment, but the report was independently recomputed through another exact-decimal parser.

License keys, accounts, tokens, and other credentials are not required from the contributor. Confidential, proprietary, or internal material may be evaluated as submitted evidence without requiring additional disclosure.

**Special Screening:**

None — no affirmative evidence supports a policy label. Public identifiability was not externally checked because review was restricted to submitted evidence.

**Recommended Changes:**

The task has strong input construction, realistic reconciliation hazards, a consistent reference, and a precise evaluator. No material changes are required. Optionally, state explicitly that exact duplicate export records represent one activity and that non-published FX dates use the latest prior published rate. Also consider including the referenced supplementary 23-run calibration logs or narrowing the claim that the complete measurement history is included.