Compliance serves a purpose and is not an end unto itself. So if you only enforce the rules even when they achieve the opposite of the underlying goal then you

Compliance serves a purpose and is not an end unto itself. So if you only enforce the rules even when they achieve the opposite of the underlying goal then you are goodhart's law personified. So even assuming for the moment that it's not the auditor's job to evaluate the rules themselves then at the very least they should escalate all the way back to those who write the rules if an inconsistency between rule and underlying goal is found. There's no point of having a separate channel for such communication because a particular issue for which it is relevant cannot be resolved (without missing the underlying goal) until the rule is clarified.