Year End Funding Recovery

I don't think they automatically recover anything. Last year, they queried some of those FRM reports that had rows on. If they were satisfied with our explanations, they didn't recover. I think if not satisfied, or you admitted you deserved recovery (late notification of June/July withdraws after R14 closed), then I assume they'll tell you how they plan to recover funds. It was something to do with the EAS, except I remember that the particular funding stream we had recovery on, wasn't an option to do in the EAS! I left the rest to my manager and Finance to discuss with ESFA.

Thanks Ruth. I've raised it with the ESFA to see if they can be more specific in the guide and just to get clarification as my finance department are asking me.

Hello, please see a message from our post 16 monitoring colleagues:

Our monitoring activity has historically focussed on two key types of report:

• Funding eligibility and data quality errors which could not be prevented or identified in other systems e.g. ILR validation
• Behavioural concerns which might be identified by evidence in the absence of data being reported, or be indicated by a potentially large volume of records meeting certain conditions.

While 1) has always led to funding recovery at year-end, 2) can be less concrete and may be used to focus on known problem areas identified through audit or investigations activity, or to better understand behaviour and providers’ understanding of published guidance.

We received feedback to be clearer about which reports would result in funding recovery, and which ones were potentially more evidence-based checks. This is because there were was some uncertainty around when we might contact you, and it also allowed colleagues to better manage their resources, for example prioritising the ‘definite’ errors. In response we worked to simplify the user guide and made use of the new dashboard format by advertising some of the key information and documents in a single place on the landing page. We also streamlined the external suite of reports down to a more manageable number, with some data quality issues being converted to ILR submission reports so that you could view them earlier. We’re looking at how best and how often to communicate with you to ensure that the action we take in-year is scaled appropriately, particularly in light of the additional burdens created by COVID.

Funding recovery

We will typically apply a recovery at year-end in two ways:

• For grant-funded provision, we apply an adjustment to your reconciliation statement. This will be offset against any published tolerances.
• For contract-funded provision, we will record a debt in the finance system which will be offset against future payments.

We do not use the EAS for any monitoring recovery activity, and so please do not record any adjustments in lieu of correcting data. Doing so makes it difficult for us to automate our processes and trace back to the specific errors we have identified. In some cases, the error may not be a 100% recovery for example, changing dates between years or full funding being claimed instead of co-funding - we therefore have to calculate the amount of overclaim.  

I hope this provides some more context. If there is any other information you feel would be useful, you can use the feedback button on the dashboard landing page. This feedback goes straight to the development team who are responsible for managing the dashboard in VYED and updating it each month.