When a resident requests Financials.

I would, if easy to do, supply the current month's financial statement without sharing any documents reflecting individual accounts. In fact, checks paid and personal account information is not germane to "studying the financials."

You should be able to get an itemized copy of the budget, income/expense reports and a copy of the reserve study, as a start, but we never provide information on other homeowners' accounts. It's a privacy issue, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act and Fair Debt Collections Act prohibit disclosing debt information (e.g. names of people who owe, to whom and how much) to other people or third parties unless those folks have some sort of business interest. I know there's been discussion on this board as to whether or not these federal laws apply to HOA collections, but our association attorney says it does and I know the penalties for disclosure is pretty steep, so we don't disclose that information.

However, homeowners should be able to get delinquency totals. When we had our newsletter, we would publish the total number of people owing the association, breaking it down by 30, 60, 90, 120 and over 120 days, the total amount owed the association, total number of people who'd been referred to the association attorney for collection, and how much had been recovered. Your board should also be able to say what legal action has been taken, such as X number of people in foreclosure, but if you want to know specifics, check the newspaper or research court records.

Oops there was another URL link that got swallowed in that last post.

Kaye Bender Rembaum

9121 N Military Trail #200,
Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33410
E-mail: [email protected]
April 22nd, 2016
The Right of Inspection of the Official Records of the Association
Members of a Florida community association have a statutory right to access their community association’s “official records”, subject to limited exceptions, including for example, records protected by the attorney-client privilege and records containing a member’s medical information. Both Chapter 718 and Chapter 720 of the Florida Statutes, regarding condominium associations and homeowners’ associations, respectively, provide that association members have the right to inspect the official records of the association, which includes the right to make or obtain copies, often at the member’s expense. The failure to timely respond to such a request can lead to statutory damages.
In the event a community association fails to timely make its official records available to a requesting member within 10 days of the request, a rebuttable presumption of the association’s willful failure to comply with an official records request is created which can subject the association to a claim for damages, too. That said, many times the same mistake is made when seeking to obtain copies of desired official records – the member requests the association send them copies of the desired official records rather than requesting an inspection of the official records.

As far as I know, records only need to be made available for inspection and copying. There is no requirement to create PDFs or mail anything. As others have said, there are certain defined sets of records that are exempt, and payment status and checks paid are not in those groups.

To be clear - only COAs, not HOA/POA, right?

Transparency.
We keep all of our records in scanned PDF files and posted to our website. If someone wants to inspect something we simply give them the link and let them find it. Takes 3 seconds to send an email. For checks, all records are exported from mint (kinda like quickbooks) and posted in Google sheets (like excel) All addresses are also for any homeowner to see along with check numbers for the month paid and penalties, Google sheets.

All transparent for everyone to see.

Its also a great way to archive paperwork for future generations of owners.

You would be surprised how many disgruntled homeowner issues disappear when people know what's going on. And some very qualified, competent people have volunteered to fix things they think they can do better. Its a win, win.

All an owner needs to do to get all our financial reports (40 pages) is request it to be sent and it will be sent in an Email. The Delinquent List is withheld.

At our Annual Meeting we give out the prior year Profit and Loss Statement, a last year Actual to Budget report, and an updated (this year) Actual to Budget report. About 4 pages in total. We review it and answer any questions.

We have only had one owner request a full financial statement and this was when we had a dues increase. He had it within two days. I followed up with an Email two weeks later asking if he had a chance to review it and if he had any questions. He replied thanks and no questions.

And when I say "pdf files are posted to our website" what I mean is our google drive. Simple save the scanned files to the google drive and share the link. Files are save in folders like this: 2019 -> Jan Year, then month and all the PDF's will be in that folder. No need for someone to update a web site, its live.

It seems odd to me that Florida condos are apparently exempt from following provisions of the Fair Credit Reporting Act and Fair Debt Collections Act, since federal law is supposed to supersede state law and COA CC&Rs. Does Florida assume that by buying a condo you're agreeing to disclosure of your debts? Or that other condo owners are interested parties with a right to know such things?

(I found out recently that one of our attorneys is licensed in both Ohio and Florida, just because things are so "interesting" down there.)

Its not in the debt collection business. Just like burger king is not a debt collector.

It is in two parts. They represent or given direction by the association, second part states the communication is from a debt collector, the attorney.