All regulatory fees for 2019 are due by 15 March 2019. If you have or are having any difficulty accessing the invoice(s), please contact Sandra Smiley in Professional Standards.

The Insolvency Service GB has issued a special edition of Dear IP concerning the introduction of the Insolvency Service’s new Case Management System (CMS). CMS is being rolled out initially to the agency’s Redundancy Payments Service (RPS), with the subsequent on boarding of its other operational areas, including the investigation & enforcement and official receiver teams, taking place within a timeframe of 12-18 months. The implementation of CMS will impact Insolvency Practitioners in two main ways. Firstly it will update and modernise the calculation of redundancy payments through automation, providing RPS with the ability to apply the latest tax and legislative rules - and any periodic changes thereto - in real time. Insolvency Practitioners and any agents they instruct to carry out redundancy payments may therefore want to study the details of the changes to redundancy payments to check that their own internal calculation models are ‘in sync’ with RPS’s, and for that reason this special edition necessarily deals with the ‘granular detail’ of the changes. To facilitate alignment going forward, the code for the calculation engine that has been developed to support and integrate with CMS has been made available as open source so that practitioners, Agents and their software providers can utilise their own version of the solution if they wish. Secondly, it has been decided to switch the RP14/A upload service away from the current RPS portal and route this process instead through the Director Conduct Return Service (DCRS). Again this will provide a more modern, more stable and more secure platform for those data transfers. As part of this change, DCRS will be re-named the Insolvency Practitioner Service (IPS). The method of uploading will not change. The only substantive change is that the DCRS platform will serve IPs for both director conduct returns and the submission of redundancy claims information, although there will be a simple, automated password re-set process to go through when users first log on to the updated service. Full instructions for using IPS will be published on the relevant GOV.UK web pages. Further information can be located  at Dear IP.

The FRC and BEIS has today (22nd February) published information for auditors and audit firms in the event of a ‘no-deal Brexit.  The Institute continues to engage with relevant authorities in the UK & Ireland on this issue and will continue to keep members and firms advised through the normal channels of communication.