Question: I’m questioning payment to the Committee Secretary. How do we know the claimed expenses have been incurred during committee work?
The Body Corporate has reimbursed the secretary for annual organiser plan on GoToMeeting to hold the committee meetings, general meetings and informal committee meetings, that are not transparent to owners. Sums included fees for payment by a credit card as well. One general meeting and two committee meetings were held online remotely, costing more that $600.
Can all expense be paid by the secretary using a credit card?
There are months with no general meeting or committee meetings, but the payment of the annual plan includes meetings in these months.
How to deal with more issues, when the committee may approve expense for $50 for attendance of the committee meeting, max. $300 in 12 months. But annual plan is not attendance. How to solve it?
Answer: As a first step you can contact the body corporate secretary/manager and ask to see a record of expenses and inquire as to why they have been incurred.
As a first step you can contact the body corporate secretary/manager and ask to see a record of expenses and inquire as to why they have been incurred. There may be a straightforward explanation.
It’s not quite clear from the description but it seems the Secretary has set up an account to facilitate online meetings. That may be a reasonable expense that was approved by the committee within their spending limit. Online meetings are to be encouraged and they have to be held on one platform or another for which there is usually an annual fee of some kind. Owners may have voted to have the capacity to have online meetings and may want the access. If the Committee has facilitated that what’s the problem? It’s also reasonable for the committee to use the platform for any informal discussions it may want – there is no real difference between that and people sharing emails or phone calls.
There may be some confusion here over expenses paid to a committee member. This is referenced in the last paragraph and is covered under by sections 52 and 53 of the Standard Module.
However, this doesn’t seem like a payment to a committee member but a reimbursement of an expense. Maybe it should have been paid direct from the body corporate accounts but if a credit card was required this may have been the simplest way to arrange the facility.
This post appears in Strata News #508.
William Marquand
Tower Body Corporate
E: willmarquand@towerbodycorporate.com.au
P: 07 5609 4924
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