I believe a cleaner solution here would be to support a more robust conditional auditing solution (see HHH-11326 In Progress ) where you can hook in a callback listener, check the state of the entity being audited and decide whether to veto the audit operation or not.

These less than critical columns would continue to be annotated with @Audited which signals that the column should be replicated to the audit schema.

But the audit event listener callback mechanism would allow you to write super-complex checks against the entity's state and be able to veto such an audit operation for your use case.

As such I'm going to close this issue in favor of HHH-11326 In Progress .