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 sent to tips@tasfga.com are treated as confidential by default. 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:
- Ordinary email is not secure in transit and TASFGA operates no encrypted intake channel today. If disclosure would put you at risk, do not use email — use post, or wait until a secure channel exists.
- 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.
- A document you send may be described, quoted, or reproduced in published research. If you do not want a particular document used that way, say so when you send it and it will not be.
- Nothing you send is sold, licensed, or shared with a commercial party. See Privacy.
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
Email tips@tasfga.com. Attach the documents; a covering note of a few paragraphs is plenty. The link below opens a message pre-filled with the headings above, which you can overwrite freely — it is a prompt, not a form.
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.