Hello All,
I have finally gone through all the info and made some sort of sense of it all. Below is the basis for my complaint to my IP. Melanie, it would be great if you could once again give me your opinion on these. This has now been typed up in a letter and is ready to go.
Original 3 yr proposal was for 50 hrs and £3,200
therefore 5yr should be approx 80hrs and £5,000
Plus £1500 nominees fees.
Total of £6,500 approx (as they never gave me a 5 year fee estimate)
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Total charges to date (after nearly 6 yrs inc nominees fees)
£19,583 plus vat & counting
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Having studied every entry and extracting every one that applies to me, my creditors, the court, my solicitors,any entries marked without info (£900)any marked just 'letter' near to other entries to creditors etc - absolutely anything that I can see that is not clearly and directly down to the IP - I have even included all the references to the annual report work in here.
Total costs - £5,712
(This does not mean that I agree with all these entries, or that they may be all that is attributable to me or the creditors, rather they are my best stab at extracting the info) - but I can't be that far out. (eg there could be an entry for 'case review' which is as a result of something that has happened - if there is then it has not been marked as such)
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This leaves £13,871 in administration - consisting of banking, payments to themselves,filing, file reviews, case reviews, agents fees (2006 so not to do with initial proposal),new supervisor work, change of staff, computer work.
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Some General Complaints :
Original hourly rate in proposal was £45-90hr but started at £110hr - Supervisor was on £180/hr after 4.5 yrs - double that of the original proposal, and he had lots of case reviews!
The costs for installing a new supervisor to my IVA has been charged to me - ie costs of all paperwork and banking work for changing supervisor - and of course 'case reviews'
The costs for change of staff has been charged to me - meetings between old staff and new staff to hand over files and discuss these files has been charged to me.
The bank accounts keep changing and the costs for changing the accounts has been charged to me.
Basic secretarial work has been done by senior practitioners/managers etc on massive hourly rates when they have been done by secretarial staff in the past on low hourly rates - I don't mind who does the filing and the photocopying but I expect to be charged at the lower rate not the higher!
Mistakes by IP staff have been investigated and corrected by other members of staff, and then the cost charged to me.
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Some examples of individual Items of Discrepency.
I asked for copies of some invoices in 2003, they posted me some and charged £72 for doing it, they then phoned me to tell me they had sent them and charged me £10 for the call.
When the new supervisor took over, the bank phoned my IP because it wanted his passport or driving license for authorising access to bank accounts - this call cost me £23
They spent £50 checking and re-issuing one of their own invoices which they didn't pay themselves.
One member of staff checked to see if another member of staff had posted a letter - this cost me £13
There is an entry where a cheque for something was refunded and their cash book corrected - this cost me £52
One member of staff on £125/hr had 7 case review meetings in 3 months in 2006 at £12.50/time and the Supervisor on £180 had 7 case reviews in the preceding 6 months at £90/time - at no other time throughout my IVA has there been anywhere near this level of case reviews.
Just as an example of costs of admin I took June 2002 at random -
11/06 - Inv Payment/Cash Book/Filing - £21
11/06 - cheq/invoice - £11
14/06 - Banking - £11
17/06 - Contribution - £7
18/06 - Banking - £11
19/06 - Banking - £7
21/06 - Banking - £11
26/06 - Banking - £11
Total of £90 in one month in 2002 at random just for banking.
These are just a sample of the entries in the WIP and demonstrate
how my IVA has been run by my IP.
Chris
