Managment company taking money from Association

Was it too late to stop payment on the checks? Plus, could the charges be bank related? You mentioned changing banks. You may want to take this issue up with the bank that had the checks written from it. Ask them what you can do about it.

The MC is a paid contractor for the HOA. So there may be some expenses they incurred that your not aware of. Believe it or not, our HOA checks cost over $100. There could be other such office and postage fees that they incurred and are entitled for reimbursement.

I wouldn't jump to any conclusions until ALL the evidence is in. A copy of the checks would be a good place to start. Plus any records of past expenses they may have gotten paid for in the past that may be similar. There might be an expense like tax filing fees that happen about that same timeline.

Roger, your last statement to the post was...

"I strongly recommend all Board consider not allowing anyone, who is not on the Board, signature authority on any financial account."

I have had this discussion many times with my MC and Board, and there are many different "opinions" on why this should not be as you stated above. Everything from "inconvenience" of getting checks signed by President/Treasurer, as it slows down the MC's accounting departments, to Board members NOT being experienced enought to fully understand transactions, etc.

I actually agree with you, checkbooks with MC, signature authority with Board.. or some other combination of this where one cannot act without the other - for the sake of transperancy, and checks and balances.

We had the same problem but it was compounded by the fact that they did not have signature authority. They wrote about $800 worth of checks to themselves that they signed and yet I was the only signature on the account. We believe it was fraudulent and that they had no right to much of that money but it would be hard to prove. A few weeks later they sent us the invoices for the $800 worth of "office supplies" that included 150 proxy forms for our board elections (we only have 50 houses and proxies are not allowed for the elections), 800 pages worth of photo copying and a bunch of other things that were just not right. But that would involve going through each and every thing that they claim to have mailed out and confirming that it was correct or not. The other problem is that the company is incompetent and so it would not be a stretch for them to just claim it was a mistake of some kind.

We wanted to be done with them and so considered it part of the "stupid tax" that we had to pay for using that management company. They have forwarded several important letters and would probably not have done that had we filed criminal charges against their president for mail fraud.

In addition to that, it was the bank's mistake for cashing checks which had been signed by someone other than authorized signer(s). As we were becoming self managed and would need to rely more on the bank we didn't want to ruin the relationship over $400.

You could fight and might be able to get some of that money back in the end is it worth it? We decided to spend the effort that it might have taken to get the money back into fixing up the community.