You may have received, or may shortly receive, a letter from the OFT regarding your consumer credit licence and a number of specific requirements made on you as a trader. This will normally be the same as the issues raised with you in the report you will have received from either Trading Standards or the OFT after they visited your business in late 2009 or earlier in 2010.

You will note that the OFT requires you to provide an independent audit of your compliance, verified by an auditor.

As you are aware, DRF has worked with the Insolvency Practitioners’ Association (IPA) to provide a solution to the continuous monitoring of compliance by debt resolution businesses; and we are now urgently exploring with them how we can bring forward elements of that necessary to meet the OFT’s immediate requirements.

Depending on those requirements, the inspection may also serve the function of the proposed DRF compliance visit, which is covered by your membership fee – but we will work to ensure that, as a service to members, the fee for this inspection (which, in some cases may only require desk-top monitoring of websites) is kept as low as possible.

You will note that the audit report is required within 12 weeks of the date of receipt of your OFT letter. This is a requirement the OFT are very unlikely to vary unless there are specific and unavoidable extenuating circumstances. Applying for an inspection and having received an assessment and inspection offer from DRF may help with this. We suggest, therefore, that you should let DRF know, as quickly as possible, whether you are likely to require this service in order that we can see how we can programme in the necessary work in time to ensure the OFT does not begin formal licensing action against your business.

If you would like to discuss this further please contact either Andrew Smith (0161 968 6825) or Gaynor Loughlane (0161 905 8322) or email andrew.smith@debtresolutionforum.org.uk

Yours sincerely

David Mond

CHAIRMAN
Debt Resolution Forum