If a member was not a member on both the starting and ending dates of the section, that will cause an error during validation. (We check both dates because of events that span a month end.)
However, if someone is a current member at the time the event is validated, then there is no error.
We do not attempt to retroactively apply or check memberships, it isn’t worth the effort.
This is now a topic on the general issue of what types of problems should delay when an event is processed (and for how long), I’m willing to discuss situations that are either hypothetical or from past events but without referring to the TD or affiliate involved.
I was thinking of a more hypothetical nature. I’ve never played in a CE event so their affilliate does not affect me. But I do tend to be responsible for the submissions of our local affiliate and I wanted to better understanding of potential speed bumps in my reports.
An expired affiliate (this happened to me once pre-on-line-submission with an affiliate that had been running tournaments for years and one year forgot to send in the renewal - a lot of time lost before finding out what the problem really was)
An affiliate that has not approved the TD for on-line submission
Memberships with checks made to the USCF that need to mailed to Crossville and manually processed prior to ID numbers being assigned (I could get ID numbers via the TD/Affiliate entry system, but they couldn’t be used to rate the tournament until the office applied the checks)
Memberships sold by another affiliate that the other affiliate has not yet turned in (especially for new players)
and the somewhat less obvious ones that may allow a tournament to be incorrectly rated:
a) USCF IDs with transposed digits
b) Transposed IDs (siblings the last time I had to correct it - fortunately during the warning phase instead of after the tournament was rated)
c) Erroneously determined IDs (I recently had a player return to USCF play after a few years and I discovered that his semi-common name had apparently been used by one or two other players during his absence, fortunately with little rating impact - hopefully Walter can sort it out from all the information I gave him)
Other types of situations that have occurred, some of them several times. (Some of these only involve reports sent to the USCF office, not ones submitted online, and vice-versa.)
A TD sends in an event from an affiliate X which has previously complained to the office about that TD submitting events under their affiliate ID.
A TD requests ‘house player’ exceptions on 15 players in a 30 player event.
A TD sends in a report with a check for the ratings fee, but has a history of NSF checks.
A TD submits memberships online with a credit card but then contacts his credit card company to say that those charges weren’t authorized by him. As a result, those memberships are cancelled.
Both the affiliate and the TD have email problems, and don’t get the validation report (which has errors in it.)
A TD thinks that having no errors on the latest validation report means that the event will now be rated, so he or she doesn’t take the final step of submitting the event and paying the ratings fee.