I spent a significant part of yesterday, when not in the car, looking at family standard fee claims. They had fallen under the microscope because of a deep red breach of the 20% Fixed Fee Margin KPI. A significant number were, unfortunately, misclaimed level 2 private law matters which would be a struggle to justify.
Andy bumped into similar problems and I had a late afternoon phone call which contained rumors of some bad fixed fee CCA audit outcomes around similar issues.
Let us hope this is not a developing pattern.
UPDATE
Appendix B of this document gives you the 14 key questions the assessors will be asking. There is an expanded explanation of the process in Appendix G. In the context of the above this makes it fairly clear that the issue at hand is “nil assessment” rather than “inaccurate reporting” the maximum sanction for the latter is an “adjustment of the payment” rather than any recoupment etc. You can confirm my reading of this especially at para. 21.
Border Skirmish ?
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This will be interesting in that the guidance given by the LSC with regard what constitutes a level 2 claim etc was very poor. To the point that individual area offices coundn’t agree. Will any of this confusion be taken into account when recoupment is requested. I think not!