By-laws

We have a situation in our association concerning our By-laws. First, I believe that the By-laws are required to be filed with the state where we live (TX). Ours were not and we are checking to verify if it is required. Second, we are missing all historical records, meeting minutes, election data, etc. for the first five years of the existance of the association. We do have good records from 2005 forward. My question is, has anyone else run into a situation where their association was clearly out of compliance with regards to maintaining records. If so, how did you resolve the problem and get back on track? Did you have any legal problems, either with the state for non compliance or in the form of a lawsuit by a member?

PS: confirm if your state requires an Annual Report to be filed every year. Keeps your corp. on file with the state as being "active"

Its unfortunate but these things do happen, I had a business (corp) and we lost all of the required records in a fire. It even occasionally (prior to the past 15-20 years and information redundancy) happened to Counties when the courthouse would burn down or be flooded. All you can do is make sure that you are in compliance going forward, like making sure that the By-Laws are filed with the County if required and set up a policy for document retention and storage. I've posted this before but there was a small HOA (no MC) near me who found out that the HOA president was moving when they found all of the HOA records in the trash on the curb in front of his house. They were lucky in that they found them before the trash pickup and were able to recover them, it could just have easily gone the other way.