The shrink-only exception

A standard a system does not yet meet is made binding by enumerating the known breaches, attaching to each a reason a reviewer can act on, and ruling that the list may only get shorter. Two properties do the work. The enumeration keeps the check green on breaches somebody has already examined and red on every new one, so the floor binds from today without requiring the backlog to be paid off first. The direction makes adding an entry a change a reviewer has to defend and removing one free. A blanket exception is not an instance of this pattern, because a general permission cannot be counted, audited, or made to shrink.