www.iva.co.uk

Hi
My IVA was due to end in October 2019, when it got to a month before the company told me I had to pay an additional 12 months, to be honest I didn't understand all the jargon but they said it was to do with equity in the property and pence in the pound. I paid this off and completed in October 2020. Last week I called the company to push for a completion letter as I still hadn't received anything and they had said it takes 6 weeks. I got a frantic phone call saying there had been a mess up and I wasn't supposed to pay anything as my IVA had been capped - I've now been refunded the whole final years payments. This is great and an unexpected bonus except I'm now a whole year behind in getting my credit rating restored through their incompetency and I still can't upgrade my bank account, mortgage etc. I'm fuming as I questioned it at the time and was told this was what happened - how can a professional IVA firm make a huge mistake like this? I've basically missed out on a whole year's worth of interest if I had saved the money instead of them taking it off me for nothing and leaving us struggling as a family for a further year.

Things like this are happening more often due to cases being moved from one firm to another and the incoming firm not being fully aware, or reading the case files thoroughly --- not that this is what happened here, but just one reason.

You can, of course, complain -- first to the firm involved and then to their regulatory body, who might levy a fine.

When did your IVA start? It takes 6 years for a credit file to clear so the extra year on a 5 year IVA won't make any difference to credit file cleaning.

I would be pushing for compensation for having to struggle for an extra year though.