Academy/Minutes & Official Records
Correcting minutes
Who can fix an error in the minutes, and exactly when they're allowed to do it.
Correcting minutes means fixing an error in the draft before the board approves it. When minutes come up for approval, any member can point out a mistake, and the secretary edits the text directly, no separate vote needed. The chair alone cannot decide the correction; only the full board can approve the minutes, corrected or not.
Correcting minutes before they're approved
Until the board approves them at the next meeting, draft minutes are just a draft, and that approval moment is when errors get fixed. When the chair asks whether there are any corrections, any member can point one out: a wrong date, a motion recorded with the wrong wording, the wrong name attached to who made it.
The secretary makes the change directly in the text. A straightforward correction doesn't need its own vote; the board typically approves the minutes as corrected by general consent. A vote only becomes necessary if members disagree about what actually happened, and then the board settles that disagreement the same way it settles any other question.
The chair doesn't get the final word
It's easy to assume that whoever ran the meeting gets to decide what the minutes say about it. They don't. The secretary prepares the draft, but ownership of the final text belongs to the body as a whole.
"The secretary or clerk is charged with the duty of preparing the draft meeting minutes... ultimate and final approval lies with the body itself. The president or chair does not have the parliamentary authority to direct the secretary how to correct meeting minutes."
Source: Who may correct meeting minutes?, Jurassic Parliament
A chair can propose a correction, the same as any other member. What a chair cannot do is order the secretary to make one.
Already approved? A different rule kicks in
If nobody catches the error until after the minutes are already approved, editing the text directly is off the table. The board instead uses a motion called Amend Something Previously Adopted, and the original wording stays untouched.
"If a correction to previously approved minutes is adopted, the secretary does not actually alter the content of the original minutes, but may make a marginal notation indicating the corrected text or referring to the minutes of the meeting at which the correction was adopted."
Source: Frequently Asked Questions, The Robert's Rules Association
Exactly how your association processes this depends on which parliamentary authority your bylaws designate, so check your bylaws before assuming Robert's Rules governs. For the full walkthrough of this motion, see amending previously approved minutes.
Check yourself
Answer before you read the explanation, recalling it is what makes it stick.
At the meeting where minutes are up for approval, a director points out the minutes say Director Park made the landscaping motion when it was actually Director Lee. What happens next?
The chair tells the secretary to add a sentence to the minutes because the chair remembers the discussion differently than what's drafted. Why is this a problem?
Minutes from last month's meeting were already approved. Someone now notices the vote count was recorded wrong. What does the board need to do?
Sources
- Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised, Frequently Asked Questions, The Robert's Rules Association
- Who may correct meeting minutes?, Jurassic Parliament
Minutes & Official Records
Next, see exactly how the motion to Amend Something Previously Adopted works once minutes have already been approved.
What varies here is which parliamentary authority your bylaws designate and how that authority documents a correction. Robert's Rules is the most common choice, but if your bylaws name a different one, check its specific correction procedure.