Accounts: Solicitor mixed client and office money
A “manifestly incompetent” law firm owner who made false claims to the Legal Aid Agency and kept her firm’s accounts in a state of chaos has been struck off.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) said Betty Igwebike Forde operated “with total disregard” for the accounts rules.
Ms Forde, who qualified in 2013, was a sole practitioner running East London law firm Anchor Legal from December 2018 until the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) shut it down in July 2023. She held all the compliance roles.
The intervention was triggered by a referral from the Legal Aid Agency (LAA), which had terminated the firm’s mental health contract for reasons that included the quality of work and claims for work where there was no evidence that it had actually been carried out.
The SDT proceedings took place in her absence after she failed to engage with them.
The LAA had found from a sample of five files that there was insufficient evidence to indicate that all of the attendances claimed by the firm under the contract had taken place.
This was corroborated by cross-referencing the records of attendance held by the West London NHS Trust.
The SDT noted that Ms Forde had offered to repay the sums identified by the LAA review of her files and accepted that there were shortcomings.
In challenging the decision to terminate the contract, Ms Forde had blamed a qualified supervisor she had employed to run the contract, as she was not experienced in mental health work.
The SDT said this was “not credible”, explaining: “[Ms Forde] was the only person at the firm who was able to make claims to the LAA, it was her responsibility to ensure that the claims made were appropriate and valid.”
She had been involved as a fee-earner on at least two of the files reviewed, so had she not made the visits detailed on them, “then it should have clearly necessitated her reviewing the file to determine who had undertaken the visits, and whether the visits had taken place.
“If a proper review had taken place… it would have been apparent to the respondent that the explanations given for the attendances could not be accurate.”
There were multiple serious accounts rules breaches at the firm, including mixing client and office money, not keeping a central record of all bills, failing to account for payments received from clients in separate ledgers, and failing to ensure the proper return of funds to clients.
The SRA found that a number of amounts due to clients were logged as ‘disbursements’, which it said “appeared to be a memory aid for recording what each client should receive”.
This purported disbursement was then invoiced and the sum transferred from the client account to the office account.
But this meant “the actual monies paid to the client could, in fact, differ to the ledger or not be paid to the client”, and in several personal injury cases cited to the tribunal, this is what happened.
The SDT said the failures and breaches found were “so blatant and egregious as to demonstrate manifest incompetence”. Ms Forde had conducted her practice “with total disregard for the SRA accounts rules”.
In finding that Ms Forde should be struck off, the SDT said “there had been a profound failure to take the basic necessary steps by reason of the manifest incompetence which had been found”.
The SDT also ordered her to pay the SRA’s costs of £65,000, the level of which was “undoubtedly impacted” by her “uncooperative approach”.
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