Conveyancer made error on completion statement and now says we owe them money!!!!

Jonesy_21

Hi all,
Bit of a strange one that I am after a bit of advice on please.
We completed on our sale and purchase a month ago, we received the proceeds from the sale with completion statement as usual. I have this morning received an email from our solicitors advising that they have made an error on the statement (malfunctioning excel spreadsheet apparently) and are demanding £4.5k back immediately as they are unable to complete to allocate our stamp duty, registrations fees at the Land Registry etc and close our file without these monies. 
Any advice on where I stand with this is appreciated, I want to say it is their error so they need to swallow the cost by taking it out of our fees to them (they were awful from start to finish and this is just typical of the service we have received) but appreciate I am likely to be on very thin ice with that....
Thanks
Kelly

Alter_ego

I'd ask them to itemise everything so you can check. But if you owe it you have to pay.

greatcrested

Well have you checked whether the Completion statement they originally sent was, or was not, correct?

If it was correct, you owe them nothing. Write back and tell themso explaining why.

If it was not correct, check the amount they are now claiming is owed, and if that is correct, pay it.

AdrianC

Four and a half grand is a lot of money to be out by - you surely must have looked at it and realised...?

Is this for +3% SDLT?

davidmcn

Jonesy_21 said:

Any advice on where I stand with this is appreciated, I want to say it is their error so they need to swallow the cost by taking it out of our fees to them (they were awful from start to finish and this is just typical of the service we have received) but appreciate I am likely to be on very thin ice with that....

You owe the money. At most it's an example of poor service and you might get something discounted from their fee. Not £4.5k though!

[Deleted User]

Where the items set out on the statement but never added up properly ?
Surely you would have realised -“ thats a bit cheap “ when you looked at it ! Most people know within a few hundred pounds what monies are needed to complete and £4.5k is a big difference 

Salemicus

It is vanishingly unlikely that the Excel spreadsheet malfunctioned. What they really mean is that one of their staff made an error using Excel.

Have they provided you with a new, updated completion statement detailing the discrepancy? Is it a simple matter of the sums not adding up, or were there items missing, or something else? If items were missing, was it money due to the solicitors themselves, or someone else?

martindow

Salemicus said:

It is vanishingly unlikely that the Excel spreadsheet malfunctioned. What they really mean is that one of their staff made an error using Excel.

Maybe they were using the government's covid counting version of excel.

babyblade41

I think if my completion statement was 4.5 k off I'd know...if you owe it then you have to pay but get an updated statement to verify 

badger09

babyblade41 said:

I think if my completion statement was 4.5 k off I'd know...if you owe it then you have to pay but get an updated statement to verify 

Me too. Some weeks off yet but I already have a 'ballpark' figure and would be very surprised if it was £450 out, let alone £4500!

macman

If it turned out that they owed you £4.5K, would you be happy to not claim it because it was 'their error'? They have up to 6 years to bill you or rebill you. Mistakes happen, and no you can't not pay it because of alleged awful service. The latter should have been raised at completion if it was an issue.