Minutes not Approved

[Guest Miss]

What happens if minutes are not approved because the general consensus is that they are completely wrong?  If motions were made at the meeting are they still valid

[Richard Brown]

45 minutes ago, Guest Miss said:

What happens if minutes are not approved because the general consensus is that they are completely wrong?  If motions were made at the meeting are they still valid

Were the motions adopted? If so, then Yes, motions ADOPTED at a meeting are valid regardless of whether they appear in the minutes. However, minutes should be prepared and approved. If the draft minutes contain errors, motions can be made to correct the errors when the minutes are being approved. If you are having that much trouble approving the minutes, I suspect the secretary is putting too much information in them. See section 48 of the 12th edition of RONR for how the minutes should be prepared and what they should say.

Edited September 13, 2020 at 04:20 AM by Richard Brown
Minor change in wording

[Josh Martin]

12 hours ago, Guest Miss said:

What happens if minutes are not approved because the general consensus is that they are completely wrong?

It should first be noted that this situation should never arise. No final vote is taken on the approval of the minutes, since not approving any minutes is simply not an option. So keep that in mind for the future.

What happens is that, at this time, there is no official record of what occurred at the meeting in question, which is an error which should be corrected as soon as possible. The minutes should be submitted for approval again at the next regular meeting (possibly with some corrections). If errors remain in the minutes, those errors may be corrected. Any member may offer a correction and, if there is disagreement, a majority vote settles the issue. If the errors in the minutes are so extensive that the assembly cannot fully correct them on the spot, then appropriate solutions would be to postpone the approval of the minutes or refer them to a committee for further study.

Additionally, if a situation arises in which the minutes are "completely wrong," then certainly something is going terribly wrong with the manner in which the minutes are being taken. As Mr. Brown notes, putting too much information in the minutes is certainly a likely culprit. Another common problem which causes situations like this is that the chair is failing to require that motions be clearly stated and, if necessary, submitted in writing, so that the secretary can record the exact wording in the minutes.

13 hours ago, Guest Miss said:

If motions were made at the meeting are they still valid

Yes.