In 2008, she was released from her contract at one school and there was a gap of several months before she was hired by a principal at another school. Nothing was being taken out for her union dues so she asked HFT what she should do, and she was told to fill out another card. Which she did, even though she apparently shouldn't have — it resulted in her paying dues as both a teacher and a teacher's assistant. Since she didn't check her pay stub, she didn't know.

In news that will surprise no one, teacher's assistants don't make a whole lot of money. Bass says she started out around $12,000 a year and now makes $18,600. So Bass supplements with public assistance. As she was getting ready to make one of her regular trips to HISD's administrative offices in 2009 to pick up documentation to hand in to the state so she could continue to qualify for food stamps, Medicaid and housing assistance, a friend of hers said, "You know you can just go online and pull it down."

Her friend walked through the process with her, printed out a paycheck and Bass finally, really looked at her deductions. And looked again. She was being charged $15.40 for union dues on one line and $23 on the line right above it. She started asking questions.

According to former HFT data entry operator Marcelina Flores, the union office that Veronica Bass walked into in 2009 was in chaos, with paperwork everywhere and little accounting of records being kept. (Told this, Pasternak labeled Flores "a disgruntled former employee" and said Flores was part of the problem.)

"I was in charge of all the membership data. I became aware some members were being double-charged and triple-charged," Flores says. "Some were charged at the wrong rate." She said she did not do a comprehensive investigation, but in the cases she examined, she found close to 20 members who were being incorrectly billed. She says she took the information to Fallon, who said something about "If they're too stupid to check their paychecks..."

A short while later, Flores said, she was dismissed, told that they didn't have enough funds to retain her position. She doesn't think that was true. "I think they realized they couldn't trust me because I was bringing to their attention problems and finding out a lot of things." In fact, she says, presented with a severance packet whose conditions included never saying "anything negative about the organization," Flores balked, refused to sign and went on food stamps till she found another job.

"I know there's a lot of things that can't be corrected, but we should be making things right, especially when members are looking up to you to handle their money fairly and effectively."
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Gayle Fallon says that with 7,000 members, of course HFT is going to make some mistakes. When someone fills out a color-coded union card — they have been improved in recent years to include the category on the front, Bass says — it's then turned in to HFT, which inputs the information and sends it on to HISD payroll. If there haven't been initial mistakes, there can be data entry ones along the way.

But, however all the mistakes were made in Bass's case, there doesn't seem to have been much of a cross-checking function by anyone to make sure the rolls were right. The hope was that inconsistencies would be spotted by someone reviewing a list of all those members' names. "You'll go blind," Fallon says, adding: "Her case is somewhat unusual but not uncommon," particularly with someone new to the system.

In a December 9, 2009 e-mail, HISD Senior Payroll Analyst Terrance J. Smith, in response to a question from Bass, wrote, "Our payroll system will alert us if a deduction code is the same as one that already exists for an employee. However, if an employee signs a second authorization with a different deduction amount ( i.e., a different dues category), then the system does not recognize that as a 'double' deduction. It is the employee's responsibility to monitor their pay statements for any possible problems."

But he goes on to say: "I would think that the representatives of HFT would be more proactive in recognizing who is or is not already currently paying dues to their organization. HISD provides this service free of charge to those organizations as a courtesy to our employees, but the responsibility for making sure that adequate records are maintained, as well as the liability for any oversights which may occur, ultimately lies with them."

One of the points Pasternak makes is that because she is a union steward, Bass above all people should have known how to fill out her union forms correctly. But Bass says she wasn't a steward until later, and certainly not in 2004 or 2008, and no, she didn't know all about how it should be done.