Do Senior Agents Do Their Job? Measuring Role Integrity in Hierarchical Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent LLM systems increasingly divide long tasks among subagents whose reports a senior agent turns into the final answer. Such a division of labor pays off only if each agent, and above all the senior agent, carries out the duties of its role. Current evaluations, however, mostly score the final answer, and a fluent, well-cited answer cannot show whether the senior agent weighed its subagents' reports or merely aggregated them. To assess whether agents at each level of the hierarchy act in line with their assigned responsibilities, we define role integrity as the preservation of an agent's functional responsibilities throughout hierarchical deliberation. To measure it, we introduce , a behavioral benchmark grounded in the structures and public records of three institutional hierarchies: peer review, appellate adjudication, and parliamentary inquiry. We choose these hierarchies because their rules explicitly assign the senior role a duty toward subordinate material, and together they cover three basic duties: to weigh, to verify, and to relay. Rather than scoring output correctness, we measure how senior agents' outputs respond to controlled changes in subordinate material, using rule-based checks and a rubric-guided LLM judge calibrated against human annotation. Across eight LLMs and over 12,000 agentic episodes, senior agents rarely adopt a planted procedural error (2.9% of rulings) but often follow a majority of generic reviews (up to 58% of decisions) or drop witnesses' stated limitations (up to 65% of cited claims). Obligation prompts reduce these failures without removing them, and they also shift behavior in the control conditions. These findings motivate direct, obligation-specific evaluation of role integrity rather than inferring it from general capability or explicit role instructions.