Estate Living August 2016 Digital Issue | Page 42

This has left a vacuum in which HOAs are increasingly expected to replicate the core services traditionally supplied by municipalities, but are unable to do so because there are no new rules of the game. The predictability of the past, when decision-making processes were procedural and routine, has become unpredictability, in which uncertainty prevails and anger mounts. Then, on top of it all, comes a thing called the King IV Report on Corporate Governance, which raises the issue of the fiduciary responsibilities of directors, trustees and managing agents. Central to these are ethics, responsibility and risk. What this means is that anyone holding fiduciary responsibility, even as an unpaid trustee or director, has to make sense of this growing complexity under the persistent shadow of the threat of liability in terms of King IV for failing to act responsibly when acting on behalf of others. Heavy stuff indeed! So where is the good news? This comes in the form of a structured intervention in which a team of professionals helps the HOA