Civil news: auditing civil taxed bills
Additional pre-payment checks to reduce high error levels on civil taxed bills
In the last two financial years (2014/2015 and 2015/16), error levels have been high in civil taxed bills. Taking just this financial year, we forecast overall errors will be £13 million.
Given the level of error, we have a duty to take action to protect taxpayers’ money and avoid the qualification of our accounts by the National Audit Office.
What action are we taking?
We are increasing the amount of audits we do on civil taxed bills.
As well as auditing files post-payment, we will randomly select bills for a ‘line-by-line audit’ before payment is made. This will include asking providers to submit the full file of work.
Pre-payment audits will involve the same level of scrutiny as our Regularity testing. We expects to review up to 100 bills a week initially, between now and the end of the financial year.
Payments
This audit activity will not affect payment times. The only impacting factor is the time it takes you to submit the full file.
We won’t ask for information we already have on file to avoid you doing unnecessary administration.
We want to prevent making avoidable reductions to submitted or paid claims. So please consider carefully your claims before submitting bills to be taxed by the courts.