ABOUT

The American Society for Governance Accountability

TASFGA is an independent, nonpartisan public-interest organization. We do not do left, we do not do right, we do not owe allegiance to any party, coalition, industry, or institution. We do results. Governance fails — sometimes by design, sometimes by apathy, most often by a mix of both — and when it fails, the people the institution was built to serve are the ones who pay. Our job is to find the gap between what was promised and what exists, propose a concrete fix, and verify the fix actually lands in reality. Paper reform is not reform.

The accountability loop

Reform cycles typically stall at one of two steps: the research paper that nobody operationalizes, or the bill that passes and then nobody enforces. TASFGA runs all three steps as one continuous institution:

1. Identify — original research, with primary-source documentation, locating specific gaps in law, regulation, oversight, or enforcement.
2. Propose — model standards, model bills, disclosure templates, and codes of conduct, written specifically enough to adopt and publicly enough to critique.
3. Verify — public, versioned scorecards tracking whether the fix was adopted, whether it's being enforced, and whether the behavior it targeted actually changed. Every year. On the record.

Who we hold accountable

Any institution whose decisions touch law, public funds, fiduciary duty, or quasi-public authority is within TASFGA's scope:

• Elected officials — assembly members, state senators, mayors, governors, U.S. Congress.
• Public agencies — city, state, and federal administrative bodies and their rulemaking.
• Municipal governance — city councils, zoning boards, housing authorities, BIDs.
• Corporate and institutional boards — fiduciary conduct, disclosure, conflicts of interest.
• Private governance structures — condominium boards, cooperative boards, HOAs, managing-agent firms.
• Trade associations, licensing boards, standards bodies — when they regulate themselves, we cross-check their work.

Why we start with residential community governance

Our founding focus is condominium and cooperative governance in New York, expanding nationally. We start there because it is the clearest test case for the accountability loop: a multi-trillion-dollar housing sector governed with essentially zero regulatory oversight, primary sources everywhere, a million New Yorkers alone under unaccountable governance, and six decades of failed reform attempts to study. If the loop works there, it works anywhere.

Who we are

TASFGA's members are educators, public servants, attorneys, technologists, journalists, researchers, and homeowners. Our in-field reporting arm for Focus Area 1 publishes at condoscoopsnyc.org.

Formal 501(c)(3) incorporation in New York is underway. Filings and governance documents will be posted here as they are executed.