Your board just spent months chasing a homeowner for $2,400 in unpaid fines. Then a letter arrives requesting a detailed accounting. The property manager sets it aside. Fifteen business days pass with no response. Every one of those fines older than 30 days, for which no prior written notice was given, is now gone. Waived by statute. Not by a judge, not by a vote. By silence.
The statute: F.S. 720.303(14)
If a member makes a written request for the detailed accounting of outstanding fines and the association fails to respond within 15 business days, all outstanding fines that are more than 30 days past due and for which no written notice was previously given to the member shall be deemed waived.
Read that twice. The trigger is a written request. The clock is 15 business days from when the association receives it. The consequence is automatic waiver of qualifying fines.
What this means in practice
The statute creates a hard enforcement mechanism for financial transparency. When a homeowner asks for a detailed breakdown of what they owe, the association must answer. Not eventually. Within 15 business days.
The waiver only applies to fines that meet two conditions: they are more than 30 days past due, and the association never sent a written notice about them. That second condition is critical. If the board properly noticed every fine in writing at the time it was imposed, the waiver provision has nothing to bite on. The exposure comes from fines that were assessed informally, verbally, or without documentation.
This is not a technicality that homeowners stumble onto by accident. Attorneys advising homeowners know this provision exists. A strategic accounting request, timed when the management company is short-staffed or between transitions, can erase thousands of dollars in receivables if the response window closes.
Common failure modes
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The request sits in a general inbox. If the management company routes owner correspondence to a shared mailbox and nobody triages it within a few days, the 15-day clock can expire before anyone realizes a response is required. Every written request for accounting should be flagged and tracked with a deadline.
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Fines were assessed without written notice. Boards that announce fines at meetings, post them on a bulletin board, or communicate them verbally have no written-notice paper trail. When the accounting request arrives, those fines are the first to fall.
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The response is sent but incomplete. A partial response or a generic ledger balance is not a "detailed accounting." The statute contemplates an itemized breakdown. If the response does not actually detail the fines, a court could treat it as no response at all.
Bottom line
The fix is simple but must be systematic. Notice every fine in writing at the time it is imposed. Track every incoming accounting request with a hard 15-business-day deadline. Respond with a complete, itemized statement. Do all three, and this provision never applies to your association. Skip any one of them, and the statute does exactly what it says.