Belvue Apartments Crosslease 93132
I request that the Owners Committee shortly explains, how the checking of payments for correctness is done. The Auditor only checks that money received or spent is correctly recorded in our accounts. But how does the Committee ensure that any work is properly authorised, performed to an adequate standard and the invoiced amounts agree with the actual work done, before paying the invoices?Although this request has not been addressed by the Owners Committee at the AGM (and it should make you think why), the matter of Gardening was brought up and discussed as an agenda item by Trevor Nye (301).
Trevor enquired about our gardening arrangements. Graham Smith confirmed, there is an unwritten agreement with our Building Manager's son Jamie Heath to provide us with 12 hours of gardening per month. Trevor asked that gardening work should be subject to a proper contract, where the services supplied are written down, even if it means paying a bit more for a professional gardening contractor. He pointed out, there may be liability / work safety consequences for our crosslease here, if casual work is done without proper contract. In Trevor's assessment, employment/contracting/tax/ACC requirements have changed in recent years and it is no longer acceptable --- as it was 20 years ago --- to just have an undocumented arrangement.
There are two issues here: the proper contracting of professional services and the independent verification of work invoiced (no, Jamie's mother is not independent). The second issue here is described below and also in section 10.12 of my January 2013 discussion paper. No formal resolution was made at the AGM on this matter, but the Owners Committee is asked to step up to its responsibilities.
Most of our bills are sent to Body Corporate Administration Ltd. with reference to our property. BCA forwards the bills to Graham Smith for approval (whatever that involves) and payment. After payment Graham Smith sends the bills back to BCA for archival in a folder and for updating our financial accounts. These are mostly manual steps with plenty of opportunity for errors. Whenever the Owners Committee meets, it receives the financial accounts for review. The Owners Committee does NOT see our bills in the normal course of action, it mostly just trusts that our accounts are correct, without much chance to verify any numbers. Now, any reasonable person would assume, there is robust checking in the process. I discovered more than 6 years ago, this is not the case and started to uncover many shortcomings ever since.
My first big discovery was this in 2009: we had been overcharged for painting over the previous years by more than $20,000.00. To my and everybody elses surprise, BCA said, it was not THEIR job to check our invoices for correctness, it was the job of the Owners Committee. Most Owners Committee members seem to have missed that lesson and never question any accounts presented to them. But I took on that responsibility and continued to uncover more and more mistakes. As long as the uncovered mistakes were due to BCA, I had support from the Owners Committee. But inevitably, when invoices only circulate between BCA and Graham Smith as per "normal process", some of the mistakes I found were due to Graham. We all make mistakes at times and it's the duty of all people involved to correct them, when they are pointed out. But this is where I encountered serious obstructions and things got ugly.
I maintain: the invoice approval process, as currently practiced, is deeply flawed, because it is completely detached from actual work oversight. Neither BCA nor Graham usually know, what work around our property has actually been completed, how long it took and whether it was done to an acceptable standard. Let me return now to the core topic of this page, "gardening arrangements".
Following the dissemination of my discussion paper to the Owners Committee, I spoke to Katrina in February 2013, asking her, whether she knows anything about our gardening contractor and whether any actual gardening work was done recently, because I had not seen any work done. Katrina said that David Shinn is "constantly around" and her family is under instruction to "stay away from him". Her reply initially didn't make sense to me: what does the presence of a particular resident have to do with her family or any contracted gardening work? (Our conversation was interrupted by a phone call at that time and I couldn't ask further).
Then, I asked BCA specifically to explain the gardening arrangement that appeared consistently in our previous years' accounts under "Heath BM&LG - Gardening" and asked to see their most recent invoice. It was revealed, there was NO gardening contract on our records and as soon as I asked the question, the subsequent accounts presented to the Owners Committee were altered to "Heath J J - Gardening" and the invoice I demanded to see was a hand-written invoice by our building manager Katrina James on behalf of her son Jamie Heath. It turned out, the mysterious gardener I had never seen doing any gardening work on our property is indeed not a real gardener at all, but a trained chef. There doesn't seem to be any real record of actual gardening work done, no credible independent work oversight was recorded, but Graham Smith had been paying these invoices for years and continues to do so. So, I started looking back into our Crosslease's accounts and meeting minutes. My findings are summarised on the gardening history page.
On Tuesday, 7.5.13, at 11:35 a.m., I witnessed the following noisy disturbance in our building:
Katrina James, her son Jamie Heath and David Shinn (406) were standing next to car park 512, David Shinn holding a broom, with rubbish bin next to him. Jamie shouted loudly that *he* is the one responsible for gardening and *not* David Shinn. He insisted that he had been given authority for gardening by Graham Smith. He verbally abused David Shinn with the words "f**k off!" and "you're a nutcase!", with Katrina standing by mostly silent. I was not impressed by the standard of manners expressed. This incident was also witnessed by the tenants of apartment 310, Dawn and Wiremu Te Kani.
I personally do contracting work in my professional line of business and I always document all my work hours in a time sheet with date, number of hours and short work description, before invoicing fortnightly with reference to the individual time sheets. That's how professional work is done. But apparently not in our Crosslease, which seems more like a certain kind of "family business".
If you don't actually live in our building, but have an investment property there, please make your own independent assessment of what the actual reality on the ground is. What you see in the "official" papers authorised by Graham Smith for release through BCA is only one version. What you can read on this web site is another version. But the difference is that I'm supplying independently verifiable facts, numbers, dates, original source documents and independent web links and, yes, opinion as well. But if you don't share my opinion, you still have enough facts here that speak for themselves. Finally, there are approximately 100 people living in our building, some of them being retired, stay-at-home-partners, working odd hours or spending much of the daytime in the buildinig for other reasons. You have always the opportunity to at least speak to your tenants and neighbours to separate fact from fiction.