Governed Handoffs from Trace to Consequence

Governed systems increasingly pass records, decisions, classifications, candidate fields, provenance objects, and status information across architectural boundaries. Existing approaches can preserve source traceability, provenance, delegation chains, admissibility conditions, or downstream authorisation, yet a separate question remains: what makes the passage itself legitimate? This paper formalizes the governed handoff as an independently assessable governance object between source-layer status and receiving-layer status. The architecture distinguishes an origin-bound status record from the status it records; the immediate handoff source from the architecture in which a carried status originated; the declared handoff purpose from its governance conditions; substantive warrant existence from warrant adequacy; and warrant adequacy from the actual satisfaction of governance conditions. It introduces a tri-state Handoff Integrity status — established, violated, or unresolved — indexed to the concrete transition rather than merely to the transmitted package. Five constructive non-entailment results follow. Source status does not establish Handoff Integrity; Handoff Integrity does not uniquely determine source status under stated conditions; warrant existence does not establish warrant adequacy; warrant adequacy does not establish Handoff Integrity; and integrity of one local handoff does not transfer to the next. The architecture therefore blocks status and authority from migrating by inheritance while permitting origin-bound records to be carried and receiving layers to establish new native standing under their own conditions.