Oberberg – Oberberg – Oberberg-Aktuell informs in this section about legal issues – The service is presented by Fincke Attorneys-at-Law Bergneustadt – Today it’s about accounting and the business plan.
By lawyer Uwe Middelhauve, specialist lawyer for tenancy and residential property law
Part III – Settlement and Economic Plan
The Condominium Act (WEG) was fundamentally reformed on December 1st, 2020. Furthermore, the administrator is obliged to draw up a business plan (Section 28 (1) sentence 2 WEG) and an annual statement (Section 28 (3) sentence 2 WEG). In future, however, it will no longer be the business plan and the accounting itself that will be decided, but only the amounts resulting from them.
The payment amounts resulting from the business plan will in future no longer be referred to as “house money”, but rather as “advance payments”. Instead of “additional payment” and “credit” one now speaks of “additional payment” and “adjustment of the advance”. This linguistic distinction is important because decisions by the community of owners will have to use these terms in the future. Otherwise they are sometimes not only contestable, but even null and void.
A challenge to the billing is only possible in the future because of errors that affect the additional payment amount, such as calculation errors or if income or expenses were not listed or an incorrect allocation key was used or costs were allocated that one of the owners alone bears Has.
Formal errors that have no influence on the final amount, on the other hand, will no longer render the billing ineffective in the future. Here the individual owner can only request that the billing be brought into shape. The billing itself remains effective.
If the manager does not create a statement, the owner must in future take legal action against the homeowners’ association, which will be sentenced to issue the statement. If the manager, as the body of the community of owners, still does not issue the settlement, the only option left for the owner to do is to initiate enforcement against the community of apartment owners. On the basis of the judgment, he can then be authorized by the court to perform substitute performance, ie he can commission a third party, for example another property management company or a tax advisor, to prepare the bill at the expense of the apartment owners’ association. For this purpose, he can have the court set an advance on costs.
The homeowners association can then in turn assert these costs against the inactive administrator as compensation, whereby this must be asserted against the administrator for the homeowners association by the chairman of the administrative advisory board or an owner authorized by resolution.
The billing must also contain a total and an individual billing in the future, whereby the inflow or outflow principle applies, ie the billing must and may only include payments and incoming payments that were actually made or credited in the billing period. For example, if the heating was repaired in 2020, but the administration did not pay the bill until 2021, this expenditure must only be taken into account in the bill for 2021.
In future, the billing will no longer have to list the account balances and their development. They are now part of the asset report, Section 28 (4) WEG, to which every owner is entitled and which is to be made available to the owners by the administration every year after the end of the calendar year. In the asset report, the essential assets of the community are to be presented, in particular the reserves and all receivables and liabilities.
An accounting obligation of the administrator outside of the accounting and the asset report only exists in the future in the event that the administration ends in the current year.
The new law has been in effect since December 1st, 2020. It also applies to previous accounting years, the accounting of which has not yet been decided. If, for example, a settlement has to be decided for 2019, it must now comply with the new regulations. The resolution texts must also be adapted accordingly.
Since in future only the additional payment amount of the individual owner will be the subject of the rescission action and, unlike in the past, he does not have to sue all other owners, the costs for the challenging owner are considerably reduced. The judicial review of the billing will therefore also become more interesting for owners who are not insured by legal expenses.
Innovations in residential property law – Part I
Innovations in condominium law – Part II
ADVERTISING
–
– –
