Refused Reimbursement

-- Please quote word-for-word the section of the Bylaws or Declaration that speaks to reasonable reimbursement for expenses directors incur. Many HOA's Bylaws/Declaration speak to such reimbursement.

-- Does the director use her or his personal zoom account for meetings unrelated to HOA meetings?

-- Can the director reasonably estimate what fraction of the use of her or his personal zoom account is for the 1.5 to 2 hours every month?

I would ask the director if he incurred any expense *in addition to the monthly charge which he is already paying* and if he can document that this additional expense resulted directly from hosting association meetings. Without both of these happening, I would vote no - since there is no expense to be reimbursed.

(What next, will directors be asking for money if they use their personal cell phones to conduct business?)

I'm somewhere between John and Cathy - I'd pay the $14.95 for three months worth, but this director should have asked about reimbursement the first time the meeting was held - then a vote could have been taken regarding reimbursement or the HOA could have obtained its own account at that time. So, there's fault on both sides.

From this point on, create a board policy regarding reimbursement of personal expenses and vote to approve it via board resolution at the next meeting (thus placing it in the minutes). For starters, ALL requests for personal reimbursement must be approved by the board before payment. Authorization to use personal funds for association business must be voted upon during a regular board meeting, and no reimbursement will be made without an official receipt from the vendor (the kind dated and time-stamped, with a description of what was purchased, business name, address and phone number - simply writing this on a piece of paper doesn't count). Nor will estimates of the cost.

You may want to add to this, but you get a general idea.

The board would have had to have paid for someone to set up a Zoom account to be the host. So the fact that this guy already had his own personal zoom account has no bearing on the obligation of the board to reimburse him.

This seems so petty I am really surprised that it’s an issue that the board is dealing with. It should’ve been taken right out of the budget as an office expense or technological expense.

Not necessarily. When I was doing the newsletter, I would ask to be reimbursed for professional printing (because there was a receipt that I could turn in). If I ran off a number of copies on my personal equipment, I did not ask to be reimbursed, mainly because there was no way to split out the cost incurred but also because the dollars involved were trivial.

If you want to be reimbursed, you need to separate professional use from personal. This is pretty standard accounting procedure. If you don't, it invites fraud (and the IRS takes a similar tack with claiming a deduction for a home office: if it is used for anything else, the deduction is not allowed). Co-mingling personal and professional invites fraud, and a good auditor would flag it - and a smart director doesn't want to give homeowners reasons to question his integrity.

How about we get the opinion of the attorney at $400 an hour for good measure.

They're all cheapskates.

If the cost is $14.95/month whether or not it's used for board meetings, then it's cheap to be seeking reimbursement.

If the board won't reimburse $14.95 that is an additional expense due to board meetings, then the board is being cheap.

Solution? If I were the director, I'd just stop volunteering my Zoom account.

As the IRS would opine, so did Augustin.

Estimate percentage of use by HOA and pay that amount gladly.

Or, do the easy, smart thing.

I think these situations are difficult.

My reading of it is that the person has a personal zoom account used for personal reasons outside of the board duties, and also used it for the board meetings. The person wants to be reimbursed 100% for all of the cost of the zoom account. This is not an appropriate expense to reimburse for because it was used for a variety of purposes including non-board reasons.

What should have happened is the person should have created a HOA-specific Zoom account and used that one for the board meetings, and not for non-HOA purposes, and that account charges would be reimbursable.

This is similar to my question about a printer in a previous thread. If I consumed 1 ream of paper for board purposes, I could get reimbursed for 1 ream of paper. If I used an entire toner cartridge, I could get reimbursed for that. But if I used 1/10 of a ream of paper and 1/100 of a toner cartridge, it's really hard to get fairly ask for reimbursement for those small quantities.