As a budget coordinator for several major organizations, I found the work challenging. While I handled budget duties throughout the year, there were generally a couple months where the work was intense. This was the period where I worked directly with managers from my department to ensure we had total employee costs (i.e., salary, benefits, training, and so on), project allocation, consulting fees, and so on. Once we had a line item in the budget, forecasting was simple. However, I remember several situations where a manager spent only 70% of his budget for employee training. He moved the extra money to the “consulting bucket.” He asked that we increase this budget item by 10% for the next year.

What’s your take regarding this practice? Do you think the manager is taking an unethical approach to the budgeting process? Please discuss.