International law firm

Over a period of 18 months our client’s Failure Score had fallen by 10 points and then risen again by 10 points. Unfortunately the rules for calculating the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) Levy meant that it was going to be based on the lower score so that the Levy was some £100,000 higher than anticipated.

Our experience of the PPF methodology and access to detailed online reports enabled us firstly to establish that we could see no obvious reasons for the volatility of the failure score. Our client confirmed that they were not aware of any irregularities in their financial reporting nor of any deterioration in their circumstances that might have been a contributory factor.

We have a good relationship with the scoring agency which we used to have detailed discussions with them. The discussions established that the fall in the failure score had resulted from a fairly minor omission from data provided to the agency by the company of the number of its employees. Because of the way the scoring agency calculates its scores this omission resulted in the application of a different calculation model.

As soon as the cause of the reduced score had been identified we issued a formal appeal to the scoring agency and provided the missing information that they required. They accepted the appeal and the PPF issued a new Levy invoice saving the client almost £100,000.