Every OMC dispute is eventually about money, and the money is the service charge: who set it, who approved it, what it buys, who hasn’t paid it, and whether anything is saved for the roof. The MUD Act regulates all of it more than either owners or boards usually realise — and the disputes resolve fastest for whichever side knows the machinery.
Mary Molloy Solicitors are solicitors, not accountants or tax advisers. Nothing on this page is tax, accounting or financial advice — engage your accountant on those questions, and both advisers together where matters straddle the line. Company law procedures, CRO practice and filing deadlines change frequently, and reform of the law governing owners’ management companies and charities is ongoing; confirm the current position before acting on anything here.
The Owner’s Side
Your protections: the approval requirement — s.18’s members’-meeting machinery, without which a charge stands on weak ground; transparency — the calculation basis, the s.17 annual report, the budget you are entitled to interrogate (what members can demand); scope — the lease, constitution and Act together defining what is chargeable; and section 24 for the disputes correspondence cannot fix (the owner’s full guide). The tactical rule: pay under protest, fight through the machinery — withholding converts your grievance into their debt claim.
The Board’s Side
Arrears are existential for OMCs: services fail, insurance strains, the compliant subsidise the delinquent, and the spiral feeds itself. The recovery discipline: clean foundations (charges properly approved and documented — the defence-proofing that makes every demand stick); engagement before escalation (disputes resolved, hardship structured); and consistent enforcement through demand and proceedings, applied identically to every non-payer. Boards with clean approval trails and consistent process collect; boards with neither breed the arrears culture that sinks blocks. The wider board practice: OMC directors & governance.
The Sinking Fund: The Sector’s Quiet Crisis
Section 19 makes the sinking fund obligatory — the savings for refurbishment and non-recurring maintenance, with developers contributing for unsold units — and the sector’s chronic underfunding of it is why major works so often arrive as emergencies levied on shocked owners. With regulations under ss.18 and 19 in drafting and OMC regulation moving to a Housing Agency unit, fund records and contribution histories put in order now are cheap; reconstructed under a regulator’s eye later, expensive: the reform horizon.
A Charge You Dispute - or Arrears You Can't Collect?
Bring the lease or the ledger. Either chair: one call maps the approval trail, the machinery and the route.
Call 01 5827148