The state agency that licenses funeral homes across Texas has gone from low-profile bureaucratic backwater to full-on crisis zone, leaving grieving families waiting more than a year for answers to their complaints while inspectors scramble to keep pace. Missing files, unsecured funds, rapid staff turnover, and abrupt firings turned what began as 2024 reform efforts into a public mess that now threatens the commission’s grip on body‑donation programs and other high‑stakes duties. Instead of quietly policing the industry, the commission now finds itself at the center of lawsuits, cease‑and‑desist orders, and accusations that its chair used her position to favor business‑friendly policies.
State audit found basic failures
A March 2023 audit laid out basic breakdowns in financial controls and records management so serious that they put money and confidential enforcement files at risk. Auditors found cash, checks, and money orders left unsecured; accounting mismatches that could not be reconciled; four former employees who still had network access after leaving; and a three‑month span beginning in August 2022, when the agency stopped tracking complaints altogether, leaving at least 39 matters unreviewed. Those lapses, the report concluded, undermined the commission’s ability to investigate abuses and protect families, according to the Texas State Auditor’s Office.
New leaders pushed for fixes — and were pushed out
In 2024, executive director Scott Bingaman and staff attorney Sarah Sanders arrived and started digging through the rubble: missing records, investigations that had stalled out, and a complaint backlog measured in hundreds of days. During the last quarter of 2024, the agency managed to inspect 138 establishments while the average complaint took 427 days to resolve; after the first quarter of 2025, that average dropped to about 345 days as staff tried to catch up. Then the floor dropped out. Bingaman, the seventh executive director since 2019, was abruptly fired by the commission and has since sued, accusing Chair Kristin Tips and other commissioners of misusing state resources. Sanders and other attorneys were also terminated and briefly pulled into litigation by the commission before that suit against Sanders was dropped a week after it was filed, as reported by the Houston Chronicle.
Chair's business ties raise conflict questions
Tips, who runs Mission Park Funeral Chapels in San Antonio, has drawn scrutiny for her advocacy at the Capitol. She testified in favor of bills that would cap mental‑anguish damages for funeral‑home mistakes, a stance critics argue could benefit her own business. An online attack ad and local coverage amplified those concerns and called for her resignation, as detailed by the San Antonio Express-News. Legal experts told KERA that the rules for when agency leaders can testify despite personal stakes are murky, leaving regulators and lawmakers to sort out how to avoid conflicts of interest in the first place.
How a viral video forced enforcement to act
The commission’s troubles burst into public view in a different way when a viral video and multiple complaints revealed horrific conditions at Richardson Mortuary in Houston. In April 2025, the commission issued an emergency cease‑and‑desist order. Inspectors reported finding bodies and cremated remains in unsanitary conditions and worked with local law enforcement to remove and identify decedents, steps laid out in agency press releases. The episode, and the commission’s rapid‑fire emergency orders that followed, intensified public scrutiny of the agency’s operations and its shaky recordkeeping, according to a press release from the Texas Funeral Service Commission.
Legal fallout and oversight questions
Bingaman’s lawsuit against the commission and its chair, which alleges misuse of state resources and other misconduct, is only part of the legal cloud now hanging over the agency. The commission has been drawn into multiple court fights over its decisions and rulemaking; at the same time, the Legislature handed it oversight of anatomical donation programs, despite staff warnings that the agency lacked the bandwidth to take that work on. Those moves have fueled calls from watchdogs and some lawmakers to consider tightening oversight or rethinking whether the commission should keep its expanded role, as reported by the Houston Chronicle.
What comes next
For families who already feared their loved ones were mishandled, the collapse in oversight has been both public and deeply personal, and it did not come without warning. State auditors two years ago said the agency needed sweeping reforms before it took on more responsibility. Editorial boards and watchdog groups have since argued that lawmakers should hold off on loading the commission with new duties until it fixes core controls, a point the Dallas Morning News hammered when the audit first surfaced. For now, the commission’s promise to protect grieving Texans rests on whether those reforms actually stick or fade away like so many previous leadership teams.
