Insolvency monitoring

We’ll contact you by phone to agree a date for your on-site monitoring visit; this will generally be six to twelve weeks before the visit. During this call we’ll aim to get a brief overview of the work you’re dealing with, in terms of approximate case numbers and case types. We’ll also discuss your last ICR; when it was done, who carried it out and the key issues arising.

Most of our insolvency visits will just look at your insolvency work. But if you’re in a member firm that falls within ICAEW’s Practice Assurance (PA) scheme, and all of your work is insolvency-related, we may combine your insolvency and PA visits. If your visit will include PA, the reviewer will let you know.

We’ll send you formal confirmation of the visit, by letter. Our letter will ask you to provide certain information about your case portfolio ahead of the visit. This will include an analysis of your case load. We will tell you in the letter when you need to provide this information. We generally need it a fortnight before the visit. If you have any questions when collating the information, please contact the reviewer.

The reviewer will phone you around a week before the visit to discuss any matters they may have identified from your pre-visit information and to answer any questions you may have.

Your visit will start with an opening meeting which will last between one and two hours, depending on the size of your firm and the scope of the visit. This is our opportunity to find out about your practice, your procedures and controls and your staff. 

We will be interested in: 

• the systems and controls you use to ensure that work is undertaken properly;
• the facilities available to you;
• the level of control you exercise over your cases, including joint appointments;
• your financial systems, including the processes relating to the authorisation and payment of fees and disbursements and your cashiering systems for dealing with estate accounts; and
• your processes for dealing with complaints.

You can invite other members of staff (such as those involved in compliance work) to join you if you want to or think this would be helpful. 

If you have any particular concerns, we will be happy to discuss them with you at this point.

We then review a sample of case files. Some reviews will cover entire cases; others may focus on certain areas. 

We may also review one or more cases that were covered in your most recent ICR as we want to test the robustness of the review. We will also want to follow up on some of the issues raised in the most recent ICR by looking at specific areas on more recent cases.  

When we review your cases, we will look at compliance with all relevant aspects of insolvency law and practice, and other legislation that may impact upon you while acting as an IP. This includes the Statements of Insolvency Practice, the Code of Ethics and common law.

After we've reviewed each case, we’ll give you details of the areas we want to discuss with you.

During the visit we will also consider your compliance with ICAEW’s regulations. The most common ones that may be relevant include our client money regulations, our insolvency licensing regulations, our professional indemnity insurance regulations and our CPD requirements.

When we've reviewed all the cases and discussed our questions with you, we will summarise our findings and then discuss them with you at a closing meeting. The purpose of the closing meeting is to: 

• agree the findings from the visit; and 
• discuss your initial thoughts on how to address them. 

Although we will be as open as possible with you about the likely outcome of your visit, please bear in mind that our visits are subject to quality control review. The final decision could rest with the Insolvency Licensing Committee (ILC).

We will ask you to send us your written response to our findings within 15 business days, by email. 

Your responses are an important part of the visit process so please take care when you draft them. Be specific and refer to any actions you have already taken, or plan to take, and set out the timescale for your actions. 

We find that most IPs are able to respond to our findings within this period but please contact the reviewer if you need more time.

Once we've received and reviewed your responses, we can finalise the visit. 

If we have nothing to report to the ILC, we’ll write to you and confirm that your visit is concluded. Visits may be concluded without referral to the ILC if you've already dealt with the matters raised, or if we're satisfied with the actions you have proposed. 

We may need to report matters to the ILC if we think that follow-up or regulatory action may be appropriate. If that’s the case, colleagues in our Professional Conduct Department will send you a copy of our report, for your comment, before the ILC sees it.

For those firms where insolvency is the only regulated activity, we will usually combine an insolvency monitoring visit with a Practice Assurance review visit. This is to make the visit process as efficient as possible.

For combined visits, the reviewer prepares separate sets of closing meeting findings for each area to ensure that any issues are clearly identified and separately reported to the appropriate committee. 

After your visit, please fill in the anonymous and confidential feedback questionnaire and return it in the pre-paid envelope. Although the questionnaire is voluntary, we strongly encourage you to complete this form as your comments will help us assess and improve the visit process. If you would like another copy of the questionnaire, please contact your reviewer.

If you would like to comment on any part of the visit process that went well or could be improved, please write to the director, QAD, or, if your comments are about the director, QAD, please write to the chief executive at:

ICAEW
Chartered Accountants' Hall
PO Box 433
Moorgate Place
London
EC2P 2BJ

There is a formal process for handling complaints. As soon as we receive a complaint, we will send you an acknowledgement. We may ask you for further information so that we can conduct a proper enquiry and, if necessary, we will arrange a meeting with you. We will review your complaint within 14 days or within 14 days of receiving any additional information. If we need more time, we will let you know. At the end of this period, we will write with our conclusion.