Missing minutes

[Erna]

If the minutes to board or general member meetings in a society have been lost, what is the best way to re create them? Can the board meet to rewrite them using the agendas from those meetings?

[Edgar Guest]

I think most of the regulars on this forum would suggest appointing a committee to recreate the lost minutes.
 
Needless to say, this is one of those (many) instances where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If the minutes were widely distributed (e.g. posted on your organization's website), the chance of losing them would be greatly reduced.
 
And take a good look at why your secretary is losing the minutes (since keeping them secure is one of her fundamental responsibilities).
 
Edited to add: To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, it's not enough to take the minutes, you have to hold the minutes.

[Guest erna]

Thank-you. We are a small group (60 members) and volunteers are hard to come by. I hope we can get a committee together. Otherwise, we hope that the board members will suffice(?), and document it as such.

[Transpower]

Please clarify:  are you saying (1) that the computer files have been lost, or (2) that the hard copies have been lost?  If the former, you could try one of the many file recovery firms.  If the latter, you should see if any of your members (other than the secretary) has saved their copy and can retrieve them.

[Guest Erna]

The computer files for one meeting were lost before they could be printed, or sent out. We have no way of retrieval and file recovery firms would be out of our non profit organizations budget I'm guessing. We have now been told that re- creating the minutes from the agenda is illegal and an act of fraud. Does anyone know if that is true?

[Timothy]

The computer files for one meeting were lost before they could be printed, or sent out. We have no way of retrieval and file recovery firms would be out of our non profit organizations budget I'm guessing. We have now been told that re- creating the minutes from the agenda is illegal and an act of fraud. Does anyone know if that is true?

 

We don't get into legality here, but it can't be "fraud" if the minutes are accurate. If the minutes are missing, then you need to recreate them somehow and the agenda is a good starting point, but people who were at the meeting will need to recall the details of what happened and fill in the gaps. I would suggest that the secretary should write the minutes to the best of their ability and then others could help tweak the minutes until they accurately state what happened at the meeting.

[Gary Novosielski]

The computer files for one meeting were lost before they could be printed, or sent out. We have no way of retrieval and file recovery firms would be out of our non profit organizations budget I'm guessing. We have now been told that re- creating the minutes from the agenda is illegal and an act of fraud. Does anyone know if that is true?

 

Smells like baloney to me.

 

Make your best effort to recreate the minutes of the meeting to the best of your collective ability, and correct and approve the resulting draft.  If nobody is intending to defraud anyone, it would be nonsense to call the resulting document fraudulent.

 

Tell whoever told you that to take a deep breath and relax.