Originally Posted by
Locke09
Because it is unlikely that any money "vanished".
Two things should be considered:
1. When you talk about money being "allocated" for something you are just talking about the budget. Budgets are just plans based on projected revenue and projected expenditures [[allocations). Both change throughout the year.
2. Budgeted or allocated money is not actually sitting in an account somewhere, so there is no real paper trail for something that didn't actually happen [[hence the statement: "It's air".) As revenue comes in, someone is looking at what money is actually needed at a certain point in time, based on actual current liabilities [[contract payments, debt obligations, payroll, etc.). That's "cash flow analysis" and I understand from financial people that it's a nightmare.
If an organization is receiving less revenue than it planned on receiving, the people watching the cash flow will require you to delay certain planned expenditures, do something less costly, or eliminate some expenditures altogether. There is no money to vanish or account for because it never actually existed.
But you should be able to account for every dollar that actually was spent. I didn't see in the article that there were actual payments made to someone but the work wasn't actually done. It just talked about allocations and unfortunately not everything that is allocated gets done. Employees generally don't know that their bosses have been ordered to stop spending because there's a cash flow problem.