The Galveston County Daily News

Heber Taylor observed in The Daily News editorial “City takes a stand for entitlement” (Oct. 10) that there are no provisions for enforcing residency requirements for elected officials.

While there is no direct relationship between his discovery of this failure and my own discoveries of governmental failures in the area of financial accounting, there is a commonality that guarantees that these failures are inevitable.

When a law is written or a local regulation is enacted, there is a presumption of due diligence on the part of those whose behavior or performance is affected in the specific area involved.

Just as it is presumed that your local officials live where they say that they live, it is presumed that your local school district follows the requirements of the Texas Education Agency’s Financial Accountability System Resource Guide. As long as school districts say they are in compliance, there is no due diligence on the part of the citizenry to investigate the details.

It also is presumed that your school’s “independent auditors” comply with FASRG rules and regulations pertaining to the testing of internal control structures and management procedures designed to prevent fraud and abuse. As long as they say they do, there is no due diligence on the part of the citizenry to find out if this is true. That is the school boards’ job, right?

Don’t bet your children’s future on it. School boards look at the financial “pictures” that their management/administration team gives them. The creation of the PEIMS (public education information management system) in 1984 was intended to give school boards and citizens alike the tools they need to drill down from the “pictures” and get to the details.

Under the terms of Texas Education Code 44.0071, each school district’s superintendent is required to produce a “list of educators” for distribution at least once a year. In order to produce this list, school districts would have to use locally detailed PEIMS coding as mandated by law.

The TEA “data collection process” includes only generic numbers with no local details. School districts easily can hide employees by coding them at “campus 999.” A “list of educators” cannot be found in any school district in the state because TEA 44.0071 includes no provisions for enforcement of detailed salary coding at the local level.

In 2007, the district court in Galveston ruled that only the Texas Education Agency can enforce the Texas Education Code. This ruling is under appeal and, until the court rules otherwise, the statute remains unenforced and unenforceable.

Which doesn’t explain why you can run for office in Texas anywhere that you own property, but it does explain why you can’t ever find out who is working where and doing what in your schools.

Nancy Kessling lives in Friendswood.