[ghuntley]

The budget has been consumed; business focused on making financial statements look good before being released to the public market for dissemination. At large corp scale, you'll experience shenanigans such as cancelling all flights/travel (unless it has C-level approval) even if it means a loss of potential future sales revenue / blocking entire teams who end up getting paid to sit there and do nothing until the quarter ends.

[douche]

The other side of this is that departments with leftover budget will cast around wildly for anything plausible to spend it on, lest they have their budget slashed next year, "use it or lose it" style.

The company I work for has made more than a couple big sales in December from this phenomenon. Sometimes they never even deploy the software.

[ErrantX]

Trouble with salary raises are; you do effectively lose it because you can't take that raise back next year ;)

[justinlardinois]

I think he's referring more to one time expenditures.