SARs online submissions: User update

Other articles (Insolvency Practitioner, June 2020):

• Michelle Thorp, CEO
• Kevin Hellard, President
• An update from HMRC
• Warning about Insolvency Practitioner identity fraud and scam websites
• Job Vacancy: Deputy Chief Inspector
• IPA Members LinkedIn group
• Join an IPA Committee
• SARs: New glossary codes
• SARS in Action issue 5
• Risk based changes to monitoring
• Five minutes with… Alan Limb, Inspector at the IPA
• Guest article from Dunedin Advisory

On Tuesday 24^th March 2020, a change was made to the functionality of the Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) Online Portal in relation to the copy-paste text function.  

Previously, a SAR containing invalid characters (i.e. characters not included in the XML specification) was quarantined upon submission to the SAR Online Portal and not transferred into the system, and therefore not viewable by accredited users. Furthermore, this meant that no other submitted SARs could be ingested until the faulty SAR was amended and released. This issue accounted for approximately 70% of all SARs requiring resubmission, and was common in instances where a reporter had copied and pasted text from a Word or other document which included the invalid characters. 

Now, when a reporter copies and pastes any text from another document into their SAR Online submission, the Portal will automatically remove any unaccepted characters from the text. The reporter will then receive a prompt to advise that the text has been amended, and will be offered a choice whether to accept or reject the updated version. This occurs at Step 5 in the submission process.  

This change is expected to drastically reduce the number of quarantined SARs and to allow the system to perform more efficiently for all users.