Legal Aid Agency claims and VAT

Legal Aid Agency claims and VAT

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Anyone else have problems with the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) accounting processes?

Specifically, I have a small Law Centre client who submits details of claims for Legal Help payments in monthly batches into the LAA online claims system, and a month later receives a payment which often bears no resemblance to the total value of the claims submitted. The LAA are repeatedly unable or unwilling to provide any details of how the revised payment amount is calculated.

Further, this online claim process looks like a self-billing arrangement, as I understand it, as the subsequent payment comes with what looks like a self-billed invoice, with the Law Centre's own VAT number on it. The thing is the VAT content on this 'invoice' is always shown as zero, even though the majority of the claims are standard rated and ticked as such during the claim inputting.

As it stands, because the LAA payments are not reconcilable with the claims, the Law Centre has no idea whether it has been duly paid for all the claims it has submitted, and as it prepares its VAT Returns on a cash basis, calculating the correct amount of output tax is problematic, plus there is the basic question of whether the output VAT is being documented properly.

Anyone else have any experience of these processes? Thanks

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By Sjm1
20th Dec 2014 14:36

The claims are there
The assessed legal help claims are accessible on the online claim system. Instead of selecting bulk load or submission list you would select previous submissions. You can select the current claim to see if anything has been reduced and the claims are exportable to a csv file.

Your client maybe receiving a standard monthly payment which is not adjusted for specific claims made by the client but is adjusted when it reaches the laa threshold of under or overpayment. The LAA pay you X amount, you submit Y amount and they adjust the monthly payment accordingly.

If your client was on the variable monthly payment scheme the laa should reconcile against their claims each month and pay a variable amount.

You can see the reconciliation of the value of your claims each month against the monthly payments made by the laa by accessing the 'management information' screen.

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