A San Antonio Homeowner’s Fight for a Straight Answer
Karina Miller, a disabled Navy veteran, bought a condo in the Lafayette Place Homeowners Association in Bexar County back in 2019. By October 2025, she’d sold it and moved out. In a lawsuit reported this month, she says she didn’t leave because she wanted to — she left because she couldn’t get a straight answer about her own account.
According to KSAT (August 18, 2026) and Military.com (August 19, 2026), Miller says charges appeared and disappeared from her account with no explanation, she was locked out of the online resident portal for roughly ten months, and she was later hit with $350 in late fees she says she was never notified about. When she asked for itemized billing, the HOA’s attorneys reportedly never responded. A scheduled mediation session came and went with no one from the HOA showing up. The association denies the allegations and says it will defend the lawsuit.
The Real Problem Isn’t the Fee — It’s Who Controls the Books
Set aside who’s right about the $350. The pattern in this case is the part every Texas HOA board should sit with: a resident asking a basic financial question — what is this charge, and can I see the itemized statement — and getting silence instead of an answer.
That silence is rarely personal. It’s structural. In the standard property management arrangement, the management company takes full custodial control of the association’s money. The bank account is opened under the PM company’s own EIN, not the HOA’s. The PM company controls deposits, withdrawals, and the ledger. Residents — and often the board itself — are on the outside looking in, dependent on whatever reporting the management company chooses to provide, on whatever schedule it chooses to provide it.
When that reporting is timely and accurate, nobody notices the arrangement at all. When it isn’t — when a resident asks for an itemized statement and hits a wall of unanswered emails — the board is the one left holding the bag, even though the board never had real visibility into the account in the first place.
Why This Keeps Showing Up in the News
This case isn’t an outlier. Texas and national outlets have covered a steady stream of HOA financial disputes this year, from managers accused of moving association funds into personal accounts to associations suing former management companies over missing funds and lapsed insurance. The details differ, but the structural setup is often the same: one party holds the account, and everyone else — board members, residents, sometimes even incoming management — has to take their word for what happened to the money.
A Structural Fix: Keep the Money in the HOA’s Own Name
At Slaton Financial, we handle bookkeeping, accounts receivable, and accounts payable for HOAs a different way. The HOA’s bank account stays in the HOA’s own name, under the HOA’s own EIN, at a bank the board chose. We — or our affiliated property management entity — are added only as a sub-user, with permission to initiate deposits and payments. The association’s money never passes through an account we control.
The practical effect is simple: any board member, and in most cases any resident who asks, can go directly to the bank and see the real, unedited statement. There’s no separate ledger to reconcile against, no gatekeeper standing between a homeowner’s question and the actual record. We follow the same principle for payroll — we initiate payments directly from a client’s own account to employees and the IRS, rather than collecting payroll funds into an account of ours first.
This isn’t just a transparency preference. It changes who’s exposed if something goes wrong. A board that never had custody of the funds and never made unilateral decisions about them is in a fundamentally stronger position if a dispute ever ends up in front of a judge — or, more often, it prevents the dispute from reaching that point at all.
Questions Worth Asking Before the Next Board Meeting
Any Texas HOA board can ask its current management company three questions: Whose EIN is on the operating account? Can a board member log into the bank directly and see live statements, or only a report we’re given? If we switched management companies tomorrow, would the banking history come with us?
If those answers are uncomfortable, that discomfort is worth taking seriously — long before a resident’s simple question turns into a lawsuit.
Slaton Financial provides bookkeeping, tax, and payroll services for Texas HOAs and small businesses using this account structure. If your board wants to see exactly how it works, we’re glad to walk through it.