The woman was the former treasurer. I remembered her because she had resigned both times in the same month, and both times the minutes simply said she was stepping down for “personal reasons.” I went back through the old meeting packets and found that she had been on the board in 2019 when the association first changed management companies, and again in 2022 when the dues suddenly increased. I also found her name on a bank document I’d never seen before. She had been listed as an authorized signer on one of the association’s accounts, but the current board had never voted to remove her. I asked the treasurer why her name was still there and he said the bank must have made a mistake. So I called the bank myself. The banker pulled up the account and told me there were actually two accounts under the association’s tax ID. One was the operating account we knew about. The other had been opened in 2019 and was still active. I asked who had access to it, and she read me three names. The current treasurer wasn’t one of them. Neither was the president.
I requested the statements for that second account and the bank sent them directly to me because my board certification was enough for a records request. There were deposits every month, almost exactly matching the amount of dues collected from the neighborhood, but the money would disappear again within days. Landscaping. Consulting. Legal services. Property inspections. None of the vendors appeared in our annual budgets. I recognized one company name because it was the same landscaping company mentioned in the water-system records I’d questioned earlier. Another payment went to a consulting company that had been formed less than a year before the account was opened. Then I noticed the withdrawals weren’t approved by the treasurer. They were signed electronically by one of the three people the banker had named. The same woman who had served on the board twice. I asked the bank for the signature authorization history, and that’s when they found something even stranger. Her authority had supposedly been removed in 2022, but someone had reinstated it six months later using a board resolution. I pulled our minutes for that month. There was no resolution. There wasn’t even a board meeting that month.
My lawyer told me to stop asking the association questions directly and start collecting documents. We requested every board resolution from 2018 forward, every bank authorization, every management contract, and every invoice paid from the second account. The association’s attorney fought the request for three weeks and then sent us a partial packet. One page was missing from the middle of the 2022 minutes. My copy of the minutes from that meeting still had the page number, but the page itself was gone. We asked the attorney for the missing page. He said it had never existed. Then the bank produced a scanned copy of the resolution that had been used to reinstate the former treasurer’s authority. It had the signatures of four board members. I compared them with the signatures in our official minutes. Three were genuine. The fourth belonged to me — except I’d joined the board in 2024, two years after that resolution supposedly passed, and I’d never signed it.
