Description - A Project's Issue has Status options including "In Progress" and "Closed".
Why is this feature important to you - Awareness of the Status is crucial to the project for User Group A but not crucial for User Group B.
How would you like the feature to work - It is preferred that changing the current Status of an Issue can be allowed only by User Group A.
Current Behavior - Any Contributor to the Project can change the Status of any Issue in the Project.
After looking through this with Support, and no solution, maybe a possibility is creating a View for User group B, a view that does not show the Status.