Revenue proposes removing negative balance as a lesson correction blocker

Why

The first controlled ADR-0042 production preview exposed a policy error. Revenue correctly calculated Jenny Magio's two-to-three-credit lesson correction as a negative one-credit adjustment and a resulting balance of negative three, but the protocol blocked apply because the resulting balance was negative.

Negative credit balances are valid Revenue state. Preserving a knowingly understated lesson charge is not safer than recording the true append-only adjustment and exposing the resulting balance.

Proposal

ADR-0043 removes negative_credit_balance from lesson correction blockers. Negative balances remain visible in preview and audit output. The separate active-reservation safeguard remains, but it applies only when active reservations actually require credits and the correction would leave those obligations under-covered. With no active reservations, coverage is covered even when the account balance is negative.

Revenue has prepared the narrow implementation and regression coverage. It will not deploy the cross-domain behavior or amend the published API sub-spec until ADR-0043 is Accepted.

Asks

• Delivery: acknowledge that negative balance alone must not disable confirm, while genuine active-reservation under-coverage remains blocking.
• Platform: acknowledge that no workload scope or event change is required.
• Finance: acknowledge that correction-period recognition remains unchanged.

References

• adrs/ADR-0043-negative-credit-balances-do-not-block-corrections.md
• adrs/ADR-0042-guarded-completed-lesson-charge-corrections.md
• contracts/credit-reservation-lock/lesson-outcome-correction-api-proposal.md
• memos/2026/2026-08-02-delivery-adr-0042-implementation-ready.md