E-mails! Wherefore art thou?

Last week’s post discussed assessing missing records when doing an inspection, and I promised I’d deal with one of the most common sorts of missing records, e-mails.

Over the years, there has been some confusion, and certainly some lassitude, when it comes to storing e-mails in the books and records of owners corporations but I think we can certainly all agree that e-mails would fall under the category of:

correspondence

Looking at our trusty Wiktionary , definition 1 hits the mark once again:

1. Mutual communication or discourse

So, under that definition it feels difficult to exclude e-mail from correspondence.

That’s the easy part, but the requirement to store any given e-mail will come down to the…

correspondents

and to get there, let’s start with the legislation – we can then build up a position on which e-mails need to be kept in the books and records of the owners corporation.

The relevant sections of the Act are:

• s180 Certain records to be retained for prescribed period
  (1) An owners corporation must cause the following to be retained for 7 years—
  […]
  (d) copies of correspondence received and sent by the owners corporation
• s43 Functions of secretary of owners corporation
  The functions of a secretary of an owners corporation include the following—
  […]
  (e) to answer communications addressed to the owners corporation
  s13 Functions that may only be delegated to member of strata committee or strata managing agent
  (1) The following functions of an owners corporation, strata committee or officer of an owners corporation may be delegated to or conferred only on a member of the strata committee or a strata managing agent—
  […]
  (f) the […] handling of correspondence,
  (g) the maintenance of records required to be kept under this Act

In summary, the secretary (and/or the strata manager delegated secretary duties) receives and answers correspondence to and from the owners corporation, this correspondence is to be retained for seven years, and must be made available for inspection.

Thinking of who might be sending correspondence about any given owners corporation, we can create a matrix of which pieces of correspondence should normally be stored in the books and records of the strata scheme, as follows:

To reiterate, this includes e-mails – there is no exclusion of any particular form of correspondence (letter, fax, e-mail) from the requirements of the Act, nor any exclusion for any parties receiving or sending correspondence on behalf of the owners corporation.

It’s important to note, however, that many (if not most, or even all) internal communications in a strata management agency would not normally be considered as correspondence sent or received by an owners corporation, even if it is in relation to tasks undertaken within the agency for that owners corporation.

A strata manager e-mailing an assistant requesting a work order be issued does not need to be stored in the books and records (although the agency may have billing or procedural reasons to do so), but the correspondence to the contractor with the work order attached does need to be stored in the books and records.

One policy might just be to “save everything”, and modern systems certainly makes that easier, but anyone inspecting records will not usually want to trawl through such “internal” e-mails along with the numerous other records of an owners corporation.

So, where are they? Why are e-mails notably absent upon records inspections?

There are many reasons why e-mails (and some other electronic communications) may be under-represented in the books and records, and these include, but are certainly not limited to:

• a misunderstanding of which correspondence is “owners corporation-related”
• a misunderstanding of privacy legislation
• disparate systems and processes used by strata managing agency
• separation of committee correspondence from strata management agency systems
• an intention to not include some or all e-mails in the books and records
• portals, discussion groups, wikis, etc. not monitored or run by the strata managing agency

In the next post I’ll look at those reasons, as they often speak to broader issues beyond the question of “where are the e-mails?”

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