Special Announcement to Members – Non-payment of CPS fees to counsel – 09.01.19

In Monday’s Message I invited the CPS to provide a statement to CBA members explaining the situation and apologising for the serious inconvenience this has caused many of you.  On your behalf we have been working hard to find out what has been going on and have it fixed as soon as possible.

I am pleased that the CPS Director of Finance has issued the following statement this afternoon:

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Dear colleagues

I am writing to update you on the issue we have been experiencing with our Counsel payments.

Our payments system crashed while processing a batch of invoices on 20 December. We have been working with our software suppliers as a matter of priority since then to resolve the issue.

On 8 January, CPS paid 3,600 invoices with a value of £2.9million, all of which were settled within 30 days of invoice date. Unfortunately it has not yet been possible to process invoices dated before 20 December, when the system crashed.

We have therefore today started a manual process to pay these invoices and are working through these as quickly as possible.

Approximately 100 Counsel payments will consequently be paid more than 30 days after the invoice date. We are very sorry for this delay and are in the process of writing directly to all those affected to apologise and provide them with details of what we are doing to process their payment.

All new invoices dated after 20 December are being processed as normal.

Chris Sharp

Director of Finance

Crown Prosecution Service

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