Seven Texas Forensic Analysts Were Licensed on Exams They Had Not Passed

Seven people were granted state licenses to do forensic work in Texas on qualifying exams they had not actually passed, an audit by the agency that issues those licenses found — and three of them held the kind of license the state requires to analyze evidence used in criminal cases.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission disclosed the audit to its licensing advisory committee July 30. It posted the recording of that meeting Sept. 22, nearly eight weeks later, which is how the matter is only now becoming public. Nothing in the record suggests the delay was anything but routine.

The state has required forensic analysts to hold a license since 2019, and 1,392 were in force by the commission’s own count, current to mid-July. The exam is the gate: an analyst who cannot pass it cannot do accredited casework. The audit looked at roughly 1,400 exams graded by a single licensing program specialist who had left the agency, and found seven where the grading had let someone through who should not have been. Each had “passed the domain minimums for the grade but not the overall total requirement of 70” — that is, they cleared the floor on each subject area but fell short of the score needed overall.

Two staff members grew concerned about “some issues with the way he was approaching grading some of the exams” after he left, a commission staff member told the committee, and the agency then reviewed everything he had marked. The root cause, she said, was that nobody had ever checked his work: the agency had “one person doing all of the work and not a signing check”. It now assigns two, with the depth of the second look scaled to the score — a full re-grade at some levels, a check of the name and identity at others. The grading itself, once done by hand, has been partly automated.

Four of the seven had retaken the exam and passed by the time of the meeting, including all three who held licenses the state makes mandatory. “Three more will need to retake the exam by December 1st,” the staff member said. The agency had told them; it said it “alerted all the people who fell within that category.”

What the record does not say is anything about the consequences downstream. A mandatory license is what permits an analyst to test evidence and testify about it in a Texas courtroom. The commission did not say whether any of the three did casework while holding a license issued in error, how far back the misgraded exams reach, or by how much any of the seven missed the mark. Nor did it say whether prosecutors, defense lawyers or courts were told anything — the only notification described was to the analysts themselves. Defendants whose cases turned on that work would have no way of knowing.

Not one member of the committee asked a question about any of it. The staff member finished, asked whether there were questions, and the meeting moved to the next item.

The commission has a real answer here, and it made it: it caught the problem itself, without an outside complaint; it re-examined every exam the specialist had graded rather than spot-checking; it commissioned a root cause analysis and put a written corrective action report in front of the committee; and it rebuilt the grading process around a second reviewer and tiered checks tied to the score. The staff member called it something the agency was “unhappy to discover” and said it had “done everything we can to correct it” and to keep it from recurring. Nobody outside the agency has commented publicly on the audit, and the corrective action report itself has not been published, so the only account of what went wrong is the one the commission gave aloud.

The three outstanding retakes are due Dec. 1. Staff said they hoped to report that all seven had passed by the committee’s next meeting, which falls Oct. 22 in Austin.