Can a fund be spent on something other than what it was collected for?
Money is raised for one purpose and appears, later, to have gone somewhere else. Before asking whether it happened anywhere in particular, it is worth asking whether the structure permits it at all.
Consider the shape of it, without anyone in particular in mind. Money is collected for a stated purpose: disaster relief, a road, a pension reserve, a building's roof. It lands in an account. The purpose that persuaded people to give exists in a resolution, a press release, a by-law, a campaign page. None of those objects is connected to the account. There is a treasurer, a signature, an authorisation, and at the end of the year a report explaining what was done.
Now suppose a different need appears, or a convenient one. Moving the money requires no forgery and often no lie: a decision, taken by people with the authority to take it, redirects the fund. It may even be defensible. The point is that nothing had to be broken for it to happen, because there was nothing to break. The reallocation is discovered, if it is discovered, months later by someone reading a report, at which stage the only remaining question is whether it was justified, a question that can be argued forever and settled never.
A purpose that nothing enforces is not a purpose. It is a preference, held by whoever is holding the money.
The reason this is worth writing down is that the usual response to it is moral. We ask for better people, sterner audits, harsher penalties. All three are answers to the question "who did this", when the structural question is "what allowed it": between the intention and the account there was no mechanism at all, and so any sufficiently ordinary person, with sufficiently ordinary pressures, produces the same outcome.
What the mechanism does
The purpose becomes a line, not a sentence. Money enters the treasury against a named appropriation, and the treasury consults that budget on every single outflow before any accounting happens. A payment with no line, or beyond the line's remainder, does not fail an audit later; it fails now, as a transaction. Spending outside the purpose is not forbidden, it is refused.
Redirection stops being a decision and becomes an amendment. Moving money from one purpose to another requires a vote at the threshold that category demands, held in public, queued through a waiting window in which anyone may object. Not impossible: institutions must be able to change their minds, and a system that forbids it is a museum. What changes is that the change is loud, dated, attributable, and slow enough to be argued about before it happens rather than after.
Nobody holds a master key. In the ordinary structure, someone at the top can always override; here the administrative seats belong to the system's own governing loop from the day it opens, and the person who built it has exactly the rights of any other member. There is no signature that outranks the budget, including the founder's.
The record is contemporaneous. Every payment against the line is dated and public as it happens. The annual report stops being the primary evidence and becomes a summary of something anybody could have watched all year. This, incidentally, is the greatest service you can do an honest treasurer, who at present has no way of proving innocence.
A scenario describes what a structure permits, not what any particular institution has done. No claim is made here about any real organisation or person; the subject is the mechanism, and it would permit the same thing whoever staffed it.