Taking HOA documents

It is my impression that all minutes from annual, budget, board or any other association related meetings are property of the corporation and are to be kept at the corporation address/office. They are to be maintained by one or more of the elected board members or officers so I wonder if it is a crime for the secretary to keep records belonging to the association.

Only if the secretary refused to return the records upon the demand of the association. Even then, most cops will dismiss it as a civil matter, so you would left with trying to get a court order for the return of the records.

It is the secretaries responsibility in our HOA to maintain such records. They are responsible for taking the notes as well for the HOA. The President can't act as the secretary so they can't take the official notes. The Secretary could keep the records themselves or take the notes and keep it in place the Board controls. We kept ours in the clubhouse closet or with our Accounting office. Either way, for members to review the records the Board would have to approve or acknowledge the request.

I wish we had an office to keep records. I am the Secretary and although there is a storage closet for old records there is nowhere outsid of my unit to store recent records. Of course We post all minutes of Board Meetings other that Executive sessions for the members to read and members are invited to attend all Board Meetings with the exception of Exccutive Sessions. We have very few Executive Sessions.

In our case we have a clubhouse that for the better part of 13 years has been the locale of one filing cabinet for these records. The files in question happen to be from 2006-08 and have vaporized. As a newly elected president I decided to scan pertinent documents from the associations inception in 2000 in order to preserve them electronically. In the process I discovered the missing files. The persons who were secretary and treasurer during those years have since moved away but took the files with them. What's funny is that officers from 2009-12 never caught it. I thought maybe there would be cause for legal action to recover them since they belong to a corporation.

KL

So Ok, they are missing and the people once responsible for them are gone.

Is there an issue that requires these documents? Are you witch hunting? Are you being anal?

What is the issue?

KL,

We had a similar issue where records were missing. I contacted all board members during that time frame and asked if they had any copies still lying around or in their computer (don't forget to look at e-mail attachments). We were able to recover a lot of the files that way.