Innovation is key to cultivating and developing new quality productive forces, yet both excessively stringent and overly loose regulation may hinder firms'innovation transformation. With the continued advancement of the Golden Audit Project, China's government auditing system is undergoing a profound digitalization transformation, and whether this transformation can alleviate incremental innovation lock-in among state-owned enterprises (SOEs) remains to be examined. Using the staggered implementation of Phase III of the Golden Audit Project as a quasi-natural experiment, this study empirically investigates the unlocking effect of the digitalization transformation of government auditing on incremental innovation lock-in among local SOEs and its underlying mechanisms. The results show that the implementation of Phase III of the Golden Audit Project can effectively alleviate incremental innovation lock-in in SOEs, as reflected in a decline in incremental innovation characterized by high patent similarity. Mechanism tests indicate that digitalization government auditing curbs R&D manipulation and enhances firms'risk-taking through full-process supervision, thereby easing SOEs-innovation lock-in dilemma. Heterogeneity tests show that this alleviating effect is particularly pronounced in subsamples with greater supervision difficulty and higher risks in innovation decision-making. Tests of economic consequences further reveal that the digitalization transformation of government auditing significantly improves the total factor productivity of SOEs. These findings provide useful evidence for modernizing government auditing capacity and building a coordinated and efficient audit supervision system.