DOCUMENT
Report a governance failure
Documents make a report usable. Outrage does not. This page says exactly what to send, what we will do with it, and what we cannot do — before you send anything.
TASFGA’s review practices are built from failures that were documented. Nearly all of them were documented by someone who lived inside the body that failed — an owner, a member, a trustee, a former employee — and who kept the paper.
Read this first
TASFGA is pre-incorporation and has no staff. It is not a regulator, has no subpoena power, cannot compel a board or an agency to do anything, and cannot intervene in your dispute. Nothing here creates a client relationship and nothing on this site is legal advice. There is no service level: a report may be read slowly, and it may lead to nothing you can see.
If you need something to happen, the channels that can act are not us. For New York residential governance, the escalation path — Attorney General complaint, agency complaint, counsel, litigation — is set out at condoscoopsnyc.org/guides/owner-rights. Send a report here in addition to those, not instead of them.
Do not send anything you are not free to send. Do not breach a confidentiality or settlement agreement, do not send material you obtained without authorisation, and do not send anything covered by someone else’s privilege. If you are unsure whether you may share a document, ask a lawyer before you send it, not after.
What makes a report usable
The reports that turn into published work all share a shape. They identify a body, name a specific thing that body was obliged to do, and attach the document showing it was not done.
- The body, precisely. Its legal name, and its address or jurisdiction. “My board” is not identifiable; “the board of managers of a condominium at [address]” is.
- The obligation. The bylaw, statute, charter provision, contract, or published policy that required the thing. If you do not know which provision applies, say what you were told you were entitled to and who told you.
- The document. The minutes, the financial statement, the notice, the ballot, the contract, the email, the denial letter. A document that shows the gap is worth more than a long account of it.
- The dates. When you asked, when they answered, when the deadline fell. Governance failures are usually provable as a chronology and rarely provable any other way.
- What you already tried. The written request you sent and the response you got. A refusal in writing is often the single most useful document in a report.
What we are looking for
TASFGA researches patterns across bodies, not individual disputes. A report is most valuable when it is an instance of something structural — which usually means it maps onto one of the seven review practices:
- Audited statements, budgets, and the records behind them
- Elections, notice, proxies, and who counts the ballots
- Records retention, and requests that go unanswered
- Contracts awarded without competition or disclosure
- Retaliation against members who ask questions
- Handling of member data and payments
- Vendor and professional credentials that do not check out
A report that fits none of these is still worth sending. A failure mode nobody has a review practice for is the more interesting kind.
Confidentiality
Reports are treated as confidential by default, whether they arrive through the form below or at tips@tasfga.com. TASFGA does not publish the identity of a person who sends a report, and does not confirm to a body under review who reported it.
The honest limits on that, stated plainly rather than buried:
- The form is the safer of the two routes, and it is not anonymous by default. It posts over HTTPS to TASFGA’s own server rather than travelling as mail across intermediaries, and the email field is optional — leave it blank and nothing identifying you is submitted. Our server does log the usual request metadata, including your IP address; a connection you do not control is a reasonable precaution if that matters to you.
- Ordinary email is not secure in transit, and it carries your address whether or not you want it to. TASFGA operates no encrypted intake channel today. If disclosure would put you at risk, use post rather than either route here.
- TASFGA is pre-incorporation and has no legal privilege of any kind. There is no journalist’s shield, no attorney’s privilege, and no whistleblower protection attaching to a report sent here. A court could compel production of what you send.
- Nothing you send is sold, licensed, or shared with a commercial party. See Privacy.
You choose what may be done with it
The form asks one required question: how may this be used? There are four answers, and each states its own consequence. The choice you make governs the report and any documents you send later against your reference number.
- Publishable. The document may be quoted or reproduced and the body named.
- Use the facts, not the document. The facts may be published and the body named, but the document itself is never reproduced. This is the default, and it is the most common useful answer. Choose it if the document’s format — a letterhead, a distribution list, a revision mark — would identify you.
- Pattern only. Counted in aggregate. No body named, no document shown — for example, “in 7 of 23 reports, boards refused a records request in writing citing no provision.” Read the caution below before choosing this one.
- Lead only. Never used in published work. It tells us where to look; anything published must be rebuilt independently from public records.
Where “pattern only” stops protecting you
Counting something in aggregate is not the same as anonymising it. If we hold twenty-three reports and seven share a trait, and yours is the only one from a building of its kind, an aggregate sentence can still point at you. The tier below it, “lead only”, is the one that protects you in that situation — and because our method is public-record reconstruction, choosing it costs less than it appears to. If you are weighing the two, choose lead only.
You can set a date, and you can change your mind
- A permission can start later. If your answer is “yes, but not until my sale closes / my term ends / the case resolves”, give a date in the Not before field. Until that date the report is held at lead only regardless of the tier you picked, so nothing is published in the window where it could reach you.
- A single document can be more restricted than the report. People rarely hold one kind of paper. The minutes may be publishable and the letter about a named employee may not be. When you send documents against your reference, you can mark any of them more restrictively than the tier you chose. You cannot raise a permission that way — only lower it.
- You can lower it or withdraw it at any time. Write to us with your reference number and we will reduce the permission, or delete the report, without asking you to justify it. A request to lower a permission is honoured on the reference number alone. A request to raise one is not, because a reference number is not proof of identity and nobody should be able to widen a permission you did not widen.
Why “lead only” is not the same as nothing
TASFGA’s method is public-record reconstruction — ACRIS, DOB, HPD, NYSCEF, FOIL, and the body’s own filings. The largest value of a confidential document is usually not the document. It is that it tells you where to look.
A reporter shows us minutes recording a no-bid contract. We never quote them. We pull the public filings, the recorded instruments, and the body’s own disclosures, and we publish a finding sourced entirely to public records. The document never appears anywhere, and the finding stands on its own without it. Choosing the most restrictive tier is not wasting anyone’s time.
The honest exception
Where a fact exists nowhere in the public record and cannot be re-derived from it, “lead only” genuinely means TASFGA holds something it cannot publish, cannot cite, and cannot act on. That is a real dead end and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
Where a report cannot be used at the permission level you chose, we will say so and offer to delete it. Holding a document we cannot use — with no privilege attaching to it — is a risk to you and of no benefit to us.
What happens next
- It is read. Every report is read. You will get an acknowledgement, though not necessarily a fast one.
- It is checked against the record. Claims are tested against primary sources — filings, dockets, published financials, the body’s own documents — before they go anywhere. A report that cannot be corroborated from the record is not published, and that is not a judgement about whether you are right.
- It informs the pattern work. Most reports contribute to a review practice, a standard, or a legislative argument rather than becoming a published item about your body. Aggregate use is the common outcome.
- If a body would be named, the standards apply. No entity is named on the strength of a single uncorroborated report. TASFGA does not name individual volunteer board members as bad actors absent a court finding, and directs its published findings at institutions and patterns. See Methodology and the standing caveats.
Send it
The form below sends your report straight to TASFGA — not through an outside form service. Only two fields are required — the body, and what happened. Your email is optional: leave it blank and the report arrives with nothing identifying you, at the cost of there being no way to acknowledge it or ask you a question.
Do not attach documents here. Describe what you hold; if the report is usable you will be sent a reference and an address for the files.
If you would rather use email, or the form fails: open a pre-filled message to tips@tasfga.com.
Other channels: general enquiries, press, and security disclosure. A correction to something already published goes to corrections@tasfga.com and is logged at /corrections/log.