Some practices may have received a notice from PCSE claiming that an overpayment of Seniority Allowances has occurred for the years in the period 2017 -2020 and that recovery is being sought.
See the Seniority Allowance adjustment FAQs from NHS PCS here-
https://pcse.england.nhs.uk/help/gp-payments/seniority-payments
The negative adjustment notice which has been issued declares a sum which is deemed to be overpaid but states that details of how the ‘overpayment ‘will not be made available until the practices make contact to confirm repayment by deduction from the June 2024 contract remittance. It has been reported that in some cases the recovery demanded has been the whole Seniority Allowance remitted for 2028 which indicates there may be errors in the calculations.
If your practice has received a notice claiming repayment and you need to query the calculation of this, or that a deduction from remittances in June will adversely affect the practice, the advice of the BMA and some local practices accountants is to dispute the claim and signal so on the PCSE portal. This will stay any deduction of the ‘overpayment’, allow the details of how the overpayment has occurred to be obtained from PCSE, and enable dialogue about any recovery and the period over which it is to be repaid.
The online form by which to submit a dispute and request for detail of the calculation can be found here (GP Payments)- https://pcse.england.nhs.uk/contact-us
Seniority Allowances began to be phased out from 2014/15 and stopped entirely in 2020. Payable to individual practitioners’ seniority allowances were in most cases paid in addition to partnership drawings; accordingly, practices may find it difficult to recover from partners who have since retired.
The Seniority Allowances reconciliation exercise was announced some time ago and is aimed to validate and process the recovery of overpayments and underpayments amounting of around £28 million over the 2017 -2020 period.
Around 1500 practices in the UK have been notified that they may owe their Commissioner for overpayment of Seniority allowance for the periods 2017/18, 2018/19 and 21/19/20: whilst almost 1000 Practices have been advised they shall receive underpayment top ups.