THIS WEEK’S TESTIMONY before a Senate panel should dispel any naive notions that the mess at the state Department of Transportation can be cleaned up by firing executive director Elizabeth Mabry or changing the way the agency’s governing board is appointed.

Two department officials — testifying under oath, at times in tears and obviously fearful of retribution — said top managers ordered the books to be manipulated so the Legislature would think the agency had less money than it actually did. One of the officials, the comptroller, walked senators through the steps she took to delay reimbursement for $78 million the state was due from the federal government. Such delays cost the state $1.5 million in interest, but it kept the Transportation Department off-limits from a cash-strapped Legislature that was raiding every pot of money it could find just to keep the government operating.

The testimony for the first time makes it clear that top executives at the department deliberately deceived the General Assembly, the governor and the public.

The allegation that the agency manipulated federal billings is not new. It was first raised publicly by Transportation Commission Chairman Tee Hooper more than a year ago. It was substantiated in the Legislative Audit Council report that prompted the Senate hearings. But lawmakers had been struggling with what to make of it, because Ms. Mabry and other top officials had adamantly and unequivocally denied that any sort of manipulation occurred.

The denials continued on Thursday, until it finally became apparent that officials were playing word games, using a secret language that senators are only now beginning to decipher: The agency hadn’t delayed billing the federal government for reimbursement, the panel was told, but had rather deferred the requested payment date — or some such semantic double-speak.

As Sen. Larry Grooms, who is chairing the hearings, explained it: “You’ve got terms of delay, deferral, deferment, which you’d think was the same thing but it isn’t, obligated, deobligated, reobligated — they all mean something slightly different, but it’s ways of hiding behind something or just skirting the answer.”

It would be bad enough if Transportation Department officials had merely squandered precious state resources by writing sloppy or overly generous contracts, engaged in high-level favoritism and ignored regulations that top officials find inconvenient — none of which seems to be seriously in doubt.

But according to state auditors and now employees who actually had to carry out the dirty work, top officials have plotted to deceive the Legislature. And once caught by auditors, they ratcheted up the campaign of deception, wrapping it all in indignant denials and condescending lectures.

This is an agency that is out of control and, worse still, uncontrollable: Ms. Mabry retains the support of at least four of the seven members of the agency’s part-time, unelected governing board. The members of the governing board cannot be removed, even if their patrons in the Legislature wanted to remove them. It is an agency that answers to no one. It has taken full advantage of that complete and total autonomy, becoming the very definition of a rogue agency. And it will continue to operate as such until we do what 41 states have done, and put the agency and its director under the control of the governor.