The poor judgment of a contractor working for a Texas Department of Public Safety has left 1,200 driving while intoxicated convictions completely invalid and the contractor in prison for at least a year. Deetrice Wallace has been convicted of falsifying inspections records for several Houston police departments and was prosecuted for three counts of tampering with a governmental record.
According to the assistant district attorney in charge of prosecuting the case, Wallace failed to change the reference sample in the machines every month and instead chose to manipulate the machines, skimming $146,000 off the top for herself. Her actions will allow …read more

BBVA Compass, the U.S. arm of the Spanish Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentina, faces a lawsuit from irate customers and their attorneys over its overdraft policies. In the lawsuit filed earlier this week, Houston restaurant Fat Butter has accused BBVA of deceptive practices, including posting debits out of order to increase overdraft fees.
 
A specific excerpt from the lawsuit claims that BBVA posted a large debit first so that it could claim overdraft fees and then posted several smaller debits, even though these transactions were not made in this chronological order. The attorney for Fat Butter has stated that these practices are …read more

The nation’s Sun Belt continues to be the fastest-growing region of the United States. Texas, especially, saw big population gains in both 2006 and 2007.