I have been asked to respond to 2, civil bill rejections in the last 48-hours. This has reinforced my view that the current LAA obsession is nothing at all to do with improved performance. Rather it is simply about delaying payment and “disciplining” the supplier base.
The work involved in the “rejection” of these bills vastly outstrips the effort involved in, for example, manually altering the typo on a FAS fee (to the value of £1). Likewise applying some discretion regarding the proximity of an FPC stamp to the bolt-on check box would save, letter production, DX fees, court and fee earner time, plus the duplicated time reconsidering this on return. (The bolt on was agreed twice elsewhere on the same bill).
These 2 actions would take 2 minutes.
The rejection letter obviously included a typo and 2 mistakes. Furthermore the relevant table of rates, 9(a), is also wrongly numbered 5(a) in my copy of the Payment Annex.
We cannot, however, reject their rejections.
I have been saying this for some time now. The LAA have been directed to assess claims faster to assist suppliers’ cash flow(according to our LAA Account Manager) so they assess (if you can call just rejecting them assessing) them quicker but still achieve the aim of delaying payment by rejecting them for the supplier to make whatever amendments are necessary.
Whatever happened to the art of assessment i.e. rather than sending the whole claim back asking for it to be amended, the assessor actually considers the claim rather than just ticking boxes, and if there are adjustments to be done they actually do the adjustments and authorise payment. The could then send an assessment letter back to the supplier. Or am I living in a different time?
Different time it is!