False Governance Closure: Structural Termination and the Projection-Relative Non-Identifiability of Positive Authority Establishment in Escalation Hierarchies

Escalation hierarchies are designed to move unresolved matters toward a declared endpoint. Reaching that endpoint establishes a structural fact: the escalation path has terminated under the declared routing specification. It does not, by itself, establish that the terminal receiver is entitled to bind the consequence at issue. This paper isolates False Governance Closure (FGC) as a governance failure schema in which structural termination, terminal placement, or equivalent procedural completion supplies sufficient operative support for a positive authority representation even though the required authority determination is not established. The paper separates the escalated matter from the authority proposition; distinguishes constitutional status from operative resolver and downstream outputs; and constructs three admissible constitutional states inside one ex ante declared comparison regime while holding an authority-excluding structural projection fixed. A tri-state corollary shows that any authority-answer rule whose only varying input is that projection can be correct in at most one of the established, defeated, and unresolved authority states. FGC is narrower than that rule-level limitation: a non-E state becomes an FGC instance only when the operative system emits AUTHORIZED and the recovered positive dependency remains sufficient after positive authority-supporting A_V contributions are removed under the defined support-neutralization intervention. Direct defeated-authority and unresolved-authority witnesses instantiate the downstream handoff form while preserving the warranted constitutional answer. An audit protocol requires independent establishment of the constitutional status, recoverable transitive premise consultation, ex ante role-sensitive premise typing, set-level structural sufficiency, and absence of an independently warranted authority-establishing basis. The result is positioned as an SSA-derived failure schema rather than a new SSA primitive, and its contribution is bounded against prior work on legal competence, institutionalised power, escalation governance, authorization, and final-authority placement.