Are you totally terrified by Twitter, lost on LinkedIn and flummoxed by 4Networking or actually quite like using all of them but want to make the most of the Twitter experience?

If so, then come to our next networking even starting at 5.00 pm on Monday 28th June 2010.

Our main speakers will again be Sarah Arrow, of Arrow Light Haulage, a consummate internet networker and pro-Tweeter and Babs Saul (a.k.a. the Blogmistress) . They are both leading lights from blogsites  Birds On The Blog, Blokes on the Blog, and Kent Business Buzz

The evening will be hosted by Kaslers RTA Department Head, Chris Lodge and is designed to be a very informal get together where we can bounce ideas and exchange our Twitter experiences.  Whilst targeted at the many Kent and Sussex 4Networking members we have met over the past few months, it is open to anyone in business in the area and will be a great opportunity to network and mingle with people you may know or are likely to meet at 4Networking events.

There is no charge for the event and refreshments can be purchased at the bar.

There is only room for 50 so book early to avoid disappointment

The venue is the Kings Hill Golf Club and to secure a place please click on this link.

All  personal injury claims arising out of Road Traffic Accidents in England or Wales which occurred after 29th April 2010 must be notified to insurers using the formal Claim Notification Form or CNF as it is otherwise known.

The process is more fully described in this article.

However before the claim can be submitted, a large amount of detail must be submitted electronically to the insurers of the driver responsible by sending the CNF via the web portal.

The form cannot be submitted and your claim cannot be progressed unless all the relevant formation is available.  For details of the information required, please click here.

If you need help with regard to completing the Claim Notification Form, just complete our short on-line form by clicking here and we will guide you through it.

CLAIM NOTIFICATION FORM ASSISTANCE is part of our Car Accident Advice service.

This only applies to claims where the value of the injury or injury related claims such as earnings loss or private medical treatment is likely to be  less than £10,000.00.

On the same day as we submit the form to the insurers, we must send a hard copy to the other driver and in printed form, the claim will generally be about eight pages long.

The form has several sections and it will be helpful if you can have the following information available when we speak.

Your Personal Details

Your full name Address and postcode

Telephone numbers & e-mail address (for our records only)

Your date of birth

Your National Insurance number

Your occupation

Whether you wre wearing a seat belt

Details about your injury

Full details about your symptoms

The name (and address) of any hospital visited following the accident (and reference number if available)

Whether you have received any treatment such as physiotherapy or if this has been recommended

Whether you have been unable to work and the dates of your absence

Whether you have been involved in any other accident in the last three years (for our records only)

Details about the vehicles involved and of the driver responsible

The make, model (where known) and registration numbers of all vehicles involved

The name and address of the other driver or the owner of the vehicle

The number of people in the vehicle in which you were travelling

If you are the vehicle owner

Whether you are comprehensively insured or Third Party Fire & Theft

Who is repairing the vehicle (if not written off)

The name, address and reference number of any company that has provided a hire/replacement vehicle

The dates of hire

If you were a passenger

The name and address of the driver

Accident Details

Description of the accident circumstances

The date, time and weather conditions

The names of any witnesses

The details of any other driver/vehicles involved

Why you think the other driver is at fault

Other Information

Whether you have any legal expenses insurance (legal protection) sold with your motor policy or house contents policy or even travel insurance

If you were injured on public transport, the name of the bus or coach company, the Route number if any and whether you have proof of ticket purchase for the journey, along with the approximate number of other people on the bus or coach.

If it appears that the other vehicle was uninsured, a description of the driver . 

If you don’t have all the information to hand, we may not be in a position to submit your claim and advance your case until you do! However the person taking the information on our behalf will be able to advise you further about this.

A quick and easy process if there is no dispute

The good news, however, is that once the claim has been submitted to the other driver’s insurers they have only 15 Business Days (three weeks) to concede liability and save themselves considerable legal cost if they accept that their insured was to blame. If they miss this deadline, the claim will leave this streamlined process and be dealt with under the much slower and more costly system which has applied up till now.

On the other hand, undisputed claims will progress very quickly from the early provision of physiotherapy or similar treatment to a brief medico-legal examination by a local GP at an appropriate time. The GP then prepares a report in a standard format and if you agree the contents, we will discuss the likely value of your claim and propose on-line a settlement figure (discussed with you in advance) to the other driver’s insurers and upload the medical report along with any documentation confirming your out-of-pocket expenses.

The insurers then have a further 15 Business Days to accept or reject the offer and enter into negotiations over further 20 Business Days to avoid the matter proceeding to a court hearing.

In less serious cases, claims will be capable of being finalised within three to six months and we will be paid a fixed fee by the insurers of the other driver which will cover your legal costs

This article first appeared in Robert’s  excellent VATark Blog and is reprinted here with his kind permission.

For periods starting after 30 April 2010

The fuel scale charge applies to all business cars which are used for
private motoring. The following table sets out the fuel scale charges
for VAT periods commencing after 30 April 2010.

The amount listed under Scale Charge is the VAT inclusive amount. You need to subtract the VAT due to get the figure to include in Box 6 on your VAT Return.

For vehicles which do not have a CO2 emissions figure, you should identify the CO2 band based on engine size, as follows:

I am often asked the question “So why do we need to use a Forensic Accountant?  What is wrong with our normal Accountants?”

The answer is, quite simply, that there is nothing wrong with your normal Accountants when they are preparing your year end Accounts, Tax Returns etc, in that this is where their experience lies and it is that experience, coupled with their knowledge of your business, that ensures all of these documents are prepared correctly and submitted to the relevant parties.

Our experience as Forensic Accountants is somewhat different, in that we operate in the area between the legal profession and the accountancy profession, using our skills obtained from training in the accountancy field, but also our knowledge of the law in respect to formulation of quantum in legal cases. The marrying of these skills enables us to prepare reports / advices which pull together rafts of relevant accounting documentation into a report format understood by the Court but, importantly, presented within the prevailing legal framework, such that the losses as presented follow all of the rules established by years of quantum based case law.

This is not a task which necessarily excludes input from your own accountant as they can furnish us with vital knowledge / information to assist us in our task. By presenting losses in this cogent and accepted format, it assists in progressing a case forward from a legal perspective and expediting settlement in the case.

It is often the case that we end up getting involved in cases where there has been substantial circular correspondence from Claimant to Insurance Company to the Claimant’s own accountant which has proved costly and frustrating and in many circumstances simply caused by a lack of knowledge in terms of presentation of information.

Richard Forth

Forth Associates

Guest blogger Richard Forth of Forth Associates in Leeds describes some concerns about the use of forensic accountants by some insurers

As many Claimant Personal Injury Practitioners will be aware, ithe managing director of Leeds basedt has become the increasing practise of many Insurance Companies, over the course of the past couple of years, to utilise the services of certain firms of Forensic Accountants to consider loss of earnings / loss of profits claims presented by them, in the pre issue phase of cases, to arrive at an assessment of such Claimant’s losses. 

Whilst, ostensibly, it could be argued that the formulation of an independent assessment of such losses, in the pre issue phase of the case, is useful, we have listened to our Claimant Personal Injury Practitioner clients and note that many have voiced significant concerns, with the way certain purportedly independent firms are undertaking this practise, for a number of different reasons, the often quoted ones being:

a)         Disproportionate requests for significant financial information in small loss cases.

b)         Perceived arbitrary assessment of losses, hidden behind a purported Expert opinion (so called spurious academia) with no detailed specified reasons as to why that assessment has been made.

c)         A perception that, in effect, the Forensic Accountants are not undertaking a full and comprehensive forensic task, rather adopting a loss adjusting type approach for the benefit of their insurance clients.

Our Claimant Personal Injury Practitioner clients have identified a number of cases where their clients have been absolutely adamant that the assessment of losses, provided by the independent Forensic Accountant in their case, was understated and we have seen a significant number of instances where we believe that this is potentially the case.

The moral of the story is beware the wolf in sheep’s clothing and, should you encounter a situation where there is a structured adamance by a Claimant that he or she is correct then full consideration should be given to instructing your own Expert in rebuttal of the other Expert’s evidence.

Richard Forth is the Managing Director of Leeds based Forth Associates offering forensic accounting services to Claimant Lawyers and Insurers alike

How does it work?

Basically, medical reports prepared by independent GPs or consultants must contain key indicators in order to comply with the Court Practice Rules.

These elements are fed into the software to enable the insurers to offer what they consider to be a reasonable sum in regard to the injury.

There are several QATs on the market and they tend to use different criteria so in theory the same medical report could be sent to 10 insurers each of whom would make a different offer.  The offer usually uses data on settlements previously made by that insurer so even if the same QAT is used by several of the sample 10 insurers, there may be a variation in the offer made.

Will insurers increase their offers?

Most QATs will suggest an upper and a lower limit so frequently the first offer sent by the insurer is not their best offer.  However, some insurers come in with their highest offer from the outset and the claims handler has no authority to improve upon it.

If the first offer is at the lower end, often any claims handler in the department may have an authority to increase the offer to the upper limit but most insurers refuse to offer anything above that amount.

What happens if the offer is too low?

Ultimately a decision must be made as to whether to issue court proceedings.  The Court will in no way be influenced by a QAT and will decide on the facts.  Consequently if the Claimant’s representative feels there is a sufficiently wide gap between the offer made and the sum likely to be awarded at court, issuing proceedings is often the best answer as otherwise there is no room for negotiation. 

This will however delay settlement for several months and often the gap is insufficient to merit the risk of proceedings

Who pays the cost of the proceedings?

Invariably offers made by insurers are in Part 36 form which means there is a substantial risk that you or more likely your legal expenses insurers will have to pay your opponent’s costs if you are not awarded at court a sum greater than the amount offered.

An example of this is hiring another vehicle whilst your own may be driveable or allowing storage charges to accumulate at a garage when the vehicle has been written off.

This also applies to inury related matters such as loss of earnings.   If the injuries such that the Claimant cannot continue in their chosen occupation, they will have to look for alternatives that they are physically capable of doing.

Solicitors already acting for the Defendant

If a Claimant instructs a law firm to act on their behalf in regard to an accident they cannot accept the instruction if they already act for the Third Party in another matter even if that matter has nothing to do with accidents – for example where the Third Party is a conveyancing client of the firm.

There can be an exception where both parties are aware of the conflict and neither objects.

The driver and his passengers

Where passengers are injured in circumstances where the driver of the vehicle may be considered wholly or partially to blame, they cannot be represented by the same law firm as the driver at the point where the conflict is clear.  In reality, if this is obvious from the outset, the driver’s solicitors should not accept instructions from the passengers.

Other possibilities

Increasingly, it can be argued that a policyholfder and his or her insurers may have a conflict of interest as frequently the insurer may desire or even insist upon settling a claim in a manner opposed by the policyholder.  A typical example is in a head on collision where the insurer may want to settle on a 50/50 basis

What’s the VAT situation for a VAT registered business that has to make an insurance claim for damage to one of it’s vehicles?

Because a VAT registered business can recover the VAT it incurs on business expenses it is able to recover the VAT on the costs of repairing its vehicle. The insurance company will meet the cost of the repairs, less any excess, and the business will have to pay the excess plus the VAT on the repair costs.  The repairer will provide the business with an invoice for the repair costs plus VAT which the business will be able to include in its business records in the normal way. The VAT on the invoice will be credited to the business on its next VAT return.

That’s the damage to the vehicle dealt with, but what about other expenses that might be covered by the insurance policy?

Can you reclaim the VAT on those?

Here I have to roll out my standard answer and that is: it depends.

It depends on whether the expenses can be seen as legitimate business expenses on which the VAT can be recovered.  If the expense relates to, for example, personal injuries to an employee and the award of damages will be paid to the employee the business is unlikely to be able to recover the VAT and could reasonably expect these to be covered by its insurer.  Only where the cost relates to some expense of the business, e.g. uninsured losses such as hire of a replacement vehicle or the insurance excess, is the business able to recover the VAT on the legal costs.

How does this affect a sole trader who is claiming compensation for injuries as the result of a car crash?

Can they get the input tax back on the legal fees?  Probably not unless there can be established a clear connection between the costs incurred and the business run by the sole trader.

All this means that if a VAT registered business, of whatever description, incurs expenses, including legal fees, that are covered by insurance the business is able to recover the VAT on those legal fees. The insurer will normally only pay out the VAT exclusive amount in such circumstances. It is therefore important to establish at the time a claim is made whether the VAT on the costs may be recovered.

Ultimately the recovery of VAT on legal and other costs associated with a car crash depends on whether those costs are legitimate business expenses.

Unfortunately I have to fall back on the age old comment that the outcome will depend on the facts of each individual case.

Car Accident Aid is most grateful to Robert for his most helpful advice.  Robert has a wealth of knowledge on how to manage VAT.  You can meet him at 4Networking meetings in Crawley where he is the Group Leader and at various other 4Networking Events where he is the 4Sight speaker- on VAT of course!

For more of Robert’s words of wisdom, view his VATark website