Insolvency Service to digitise 300,000 creditor reports per year

Project will allow those owed money by fallen firms to send and receive documentation digitally

Credit: Jana Schneider/Pixabay

The Insolvency Service is planning a transformation project that will digitise more than 300,00 documents issued each year to creditors of fallen businesses.

The agency currently issues reports to creditors (RTC) and proof of debt (POD) documents via “processes [that] are high-volume, paper-based, and heavily reliant on manual activities”.

A Customer Digital Services project established last year has already completed a discovery and alpha phase of a project and “identified a solution to digitise” both documents issued by the service and creditors’ provision of evidence to support claims for money owed. 

A specialist supplier is now being sought to develop the digital service, according to a recently published commercial notice.

Over the period of six months, the chosen firm will be tasked with creating a tool that is ready to enter public beta by about July 2023. Once this has been achieved and the service is up and running, the provider will be retained for a further three-month period of “hypercare”.

The documents being digitised are issued by the Insolvency Service after a firm has been liquidated or declared bankrupt. They provide key information to support claims made by creditors for money owed by the insolvent company. The service said that it typically issues between 300,000 and 350,000 reports to creditors each year. 


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The service also aims to digitise the processes through which creditors can register their interest in a bankruptcy, make claims for payment, and provide the Insolvency Service with the necessary proof-of-debt forms and supporting documentary evidence.

Six months ago the Insolvency Service announced plans to close more than half of its offices across England over the coming years, and use a chunk of the projected savings of £20m to boost its online service offering.

Such digitisation work ties in with the ambitions set out in a wider five-year strategy embarked upon by the agency last year “with the aim to identify and deliver technology-related improvements to how we interact with our customers”.

The procurement notice for the RTC project added: “The improvements we deliver will be in line with the agency vision to be digital first and easy to do business with. This may involve improving existing digital external contact points or digitising services which are currently paper based. Two of our key goals are to: minimise avoidable customer contact by providing customers with what they need through greater automated communication and self-serve opportunities; [and] identify opportunities to enhance our existing external contact points to ensure customers are directed to the appropriate channel and can provide the right information first time.”

Suppliers interested in delivering the project have until midnight on 21 November to bid to do so. The Insolvency Service – which operates as an executive agency of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy – indicated that it is “not able to provide a defined set budget for this opportunity [and] will be assessing cost/value for money as part of the scoring at the proposal stage”.

 

Sam Trendall

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