The Leader
December 2019: Managing Your Hall Association

They’re the only guarantees that life offers, as they saying goes. And for Michael Vickerman, past master of Antioch Brentwood Lodge No. 175, they go hand-in-hand. “Taxes bore me to death,” Vickerman says with a laugh. A truck driver by trade, in 2010 Vickerman found himself taking over as treasurer of the lodge’s hall association out of necessity—and almost immediately faced with a very big problem.

Without any formal financial training and staring down the barrel of a crippling tax debt, Vickerman was forced to learn on the fly and familiarize himself with the growing suite of centralized services available to hall associations. Despite his own misgivings and years of neglect, Vickerman was—with significant help from Grand Lodge staff—ultimately able to fend off Uncle Sam and put the hall’s house back in order.

Righting the Ship

Just a few months after taking over as hall association treasurer, Vickerman received a threatening letter from the IRS—a sure sign that all was not right. It was a bill for unpaid taxes going back several years. It turns out that the Antioch Brentwood Hall Association hadn’t been filing taxes or even communicating with the IRS for years. In the interim, the State Franchise Tax Board had revoked the association’s 501(c)3 tax status, which meant that the meager revenue produced by the retail spaces on the ground floor of the lodge building were now fully taxable as income.

Already, the lodge had been subsidizing the hall association’s budget and helping pay its monthly utility bills. The loss of its tax-exempt status made the association an even greater burden—one that threatened to sink the lodge into bankruptcy. Acting quickly, Vickerman gathered as many of the association’s financial records as he could find and took his problem to a tax preparer. Unfortunately, rather than helping the situation, the preparer misfiled the association’s taxes, compounding an already dire problem. “That’s when I approached the Grand Lodge,” Vickerman says. “And it was like a light went on.”

At the time, the Grand Lodge financial services team was just beginning to roll out its financial reporting and bookkeeping program, Intacct. And so over the next two years, Vickerman worked with staff to import the hall association’s financial records into the new system. “Each year, staff helped file our taxes and establish a history of filings, which was important in our effort to recover our tax-exempt status,” Vickerman says. Meanwhile, he attended the secretaries and treasurer retreats and gained confidence in his growing bookkeeping skills.

Finally, in early 2019, Vickerman received the letter he’d been working toward: notification from the California State Franchise Tax Board that the Antioch Brentwood Hall Association had recovered its tax-exempt status. All told, Grand Lodge’s financial services team was able to reduce the hall association’s tax obligation from nearly $2,000 to just $800. And in so doing, Vickerman had finally squared the association’s finances and established a method for managing it into the future. “If a truck driver can do it,” Vickerman says, “anyone can.”