Procurement & finance
Virement (Budget Transfer)
Moving approved budget between lines without changing the total — zero-sum by definition. It is the safety valve that keeps a budget realistic, and, ungoverned, the mechanism that launders an overrun.
The distinction that everything rests on: a transfer reallocates within the approved total; a supplement adds new money and needs the authority that approved the original. Conflating them means spending money nobody approved, through a process designed for money everybody did.
And cumulative caps beat per-transfer caps. Eleven transfers between the same two lines, each comfortably under the threshold, will launder a structural overrun without any single approval ever looking unreasonable — because none of them is.