Withdrawals into Previous Academic Year - Claw Back Query

If you're being super diligent then yes, you could repay the funds via the EAS. Learners like this should appear on your FRM27 report which looks at 'Continuing or completed learning aims that are now reported as withdrawn on or before 31 July of the previous funding year'. The guidance for which is:

What you need to do

You can calculate and repay the overclaim in-year through EAS, recording a negative figure in the ‘authorised claims’ adjustment type. You do not need our permission to use this adjustment type to pay back funding. However, please let us know the details behind the adjustments you are repaying funding for by contacting our Customer Help Portal, selecting the ‘DfE/ESFA returns and data requests’ option. The ESFA funded adult skills fund: funding rates and formula provides further guidance on this – see ‘recording late data in the ILR’.

What we will do

We will recover any funding overclaim for errors that remain in your R14 data return once we have confirmed any adjustments reported through EAS. As this error will relate to previous funding years, we will not process this recovery through final claims and reconciliation processes for the current year, but we will account for previous year’s reconciliation processes.

I'm interested in this. They should appear as FRM27 errors.

For the last several years, we've had an email from ESFA in maybe Dec/Jan after the R14, and they tell us how much they think we overclaimed from previous years, we agree that sounds about right, and they claw it back then.

I have heard other providers saying they proactively hand it back in the EAS. Do they just then tell ESFA when they get the Dec/Jan email that they already did it? What if the values don't match? It's very manual to calculate this sometimes, and the overclaim I calculate never exactly matches what ESFA say. It's always in the ballpark, so we always just agree to the value they tell us.

Hi Ben - Thanks, it was the FRM27 report I was looking at to use so good to have that confirmed!  It was the word "can calculate" which made me think it wasn't a "must" and so they must do it at another point perhaps, however I couldn't see anywhere where it states when or how this was done.

Hi Ruth - Thanks, Dec/Jan ish fits in with what I had heard before but have never personally seen that email so likely goes to someone else. I lean towards leaving it "automated" and checking the figures at that point as any overlap would make this confusing.

Thank you both for your help.

Just for extra info, I keep an eye on FRM27 all year, doing the overclaim calculations as they crop up. Around this time of year I sum the total overclaim and tell my bosses who give Finance a heads up. I have high hopes for no overclaim next year! The one team who always cause these has a new Head, who has been doing a really thorough clear out and putting in place some more stringent checking processes.

The email does go to the principal I think, so worth letting them know so they're not alarmed by it.