OPG sets end-month deadline for professional guardian scheme applications

A deadline of 31 January for those wishing to join the new professional guardians scheme has been set by the Office of the Public Guardian.

Under the scheme, professional guardians who have five or more guardianship cases will no longer have all their accounts given the traditional full annual account review by the OPG on every case. Instead the OPG will randomly sample a selection, and assuming the audits on these are "clean", will accept the remainder with a covering one page summary sheet only.

The OPG said this would "markedly improve the time taken for audit and thus for remuneration to be awarded".

In an update on the scheme the OPG thanked those who had already applied to join, and having received further enquiries from interested professionals it had written to other eligible firms to invite them to apply. "These applications are to be returned to us by 31 January 2017."

Mandatory workshops for those joining are planned to be held in March 2017.

Click here for more information about the scheme.