At least 1,350 Texas lawyers have had the wrong continuing-education compliance status in State Bar of Texas records because of a system error that went unaddressed from at least 2019, the State Auditor’s Office reported Oct. 26. Depending on how many of those lawyers were exempt, the fees the Bar never collected could range from an estimated $137,000 to $550,000.
The finding is in an efficiency audit of the State Bar and the Board of Law Examiners. The Bar is the agency that handles lawyer discipline and the yearly requirement known as MCLE, for minimum continuing legal education: the course hours Texas lawyers must complete. Lawyers who fall short are charged non-compliance fees.
The auditors traced the error to a hand-off. The MCLE system produces a report of lawyers who are out of compliance. MCLE staff then ask the Bar’s information technology staff to apply the fees and send the notices. The auditors found that work “fragmented” between the two groups, and the error stayed in place. As of July 2026, the Bar said it was working to correct the affected records.
The audit also looked at how the Bar collects money in disciplinary cases. According to the Bar’s annual reports, it took in $461,713 in grievance-related payments from June 2024 to May 2026. Lawyers cannot pay those amounts online. Certified checks and money orders arrive at regional offices, which deposit them locally and email deposit logs to the Accounting Department in Austin. When a check names the wrong payee, the auditors wrote, fixing it takes “a significant amount of time.”
The auditors recommended that the Bar accept online payments for grievance fees, rank its most time-consuming manual workarounds for automation, and make sure its next MCLE system fixes the problems of the current one. In 2025 the Bar received nearly 40,000 applications for course accreditation, and the audit says staff follow-up on incomplete applications is the most common reason approvals are delayed.
The Bar agreed to the recommendations. Its management plan sets January 2027 for online grievance payments, and the Bar plans to replace its MCLE system by June 2027.
Those dates are months away. The nearer test is whether the Bar finishes correcting the 1,350 records, a job it said in July it was still doing.