Financial Ombudsman - Can they disregard the FCA Rules and the Law of the Land?

Undervalued

MyRealNameToo said:

Ricecrispies said:

But this was a few lines in the context of several pages of submissions about the issue we were looking into and at no point did you ask us to raise this as a further complaint.'

This is a major part of your problem, you've waffled, included a lot of unnecessary details and descended into long detouring rants meaning some poor investigator has to try to work out from the pages of words you send what are actually the salient points. 

If it's more than a page in length, it's too long. If it's more than half a page you should be looking to cut it back. 


Secondly, to answer your other question, no the FOS doesnt have to blindly follow the law. Search for S75 decisions and you will often see them explain that they are legally obliged to find fair decisions and their decisions may well be different to what a court of law would decide.

Ricecrispies said:
My complaint was regarding the actions of a bank.  The Ombudsman is funded by banks.  I wonder if I am just unlucky or has anyone else had a similar experience?

Ombudsman has to be funded by someone and so they are funded by financial services companies but they have a legal duty and so are far from biased towards the FS companies... most would argue because they can diverge from what the law strictly states that they are much more customer leaning. 

Plenty of people who write dozens of pages of complaint will be in the same boat but it was a self inflicted problem

Agree with the others that the DRN reference would be useful, I assume its https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/decision/DRN-5244681.pdf

^^^^^^^^ Exactly this!

Ricecrispies

Thank you all for your comments.

Happy Harry asked for the DRN number.  I didn't think it worth including as 75% of it is incorrect.  The Ombudsman 'assumed' and 'thought' to reach his conclusion.  I can tell you the final decision did not include the two points I am now trying to raise. If you read it [Removed by Forum Team], I can tell you solicitors and accountants were not involved. I asked the bank.  That recording has not been supplied.  One Solicitor was appointed to restore the company.  
I can not afford to take it to court.
I am the Director, appointed following the death of my husband.(2022)
The Independent Assessor told me that the business had broken the law.
The money was deposited by an investment company into the 'client account'.
The company was struck off on 28 March and dissolved on 4 April.  The money was deposited by the investment company and accepted by the bank on 4 April.
The advice that there were no restrictions on the account was 28 March,- it had been struck off.
The missing recording says that as it was not money belonging to the business, the client account would remain safe.  I had closed all the other business accounts.

What I really would like to know, has anyone else had problems with the FOS and banks?

eskbanker

Ricecrispies said:

What I really would like to know, has anyone else had problems with the FOS and banks?

Well of course they have - everyone who doesn't get the result they wanted at FOS will be convinced that they've been hard done by (or they wouldn't have escalated the complaint to FOS in the first place), so there will be plenty of others who'll express similar grievances - however, the circumstances will naturally differ from one case to another, so it's unclear how this would help you in any way.

If you've exhausted the FOS process, including a final ombudsman decision and the independent assessor then you have two remaining choices:

1. Accept it and move on
2. Take legal action

If you're saying that you can't afford to pursue option 2 then that leaves option 1....

born_again

Ricecrispies said:

Thank you all for your comments.

Happy Harry asked for the DRN number.  I didn't think it worth including as 75% of it is incorrect.  The Ombudsman 'assumed' and 'thought' to reach his conclusion.  I can tell you the final decision did not include the two points I am now trying to raise. If you read it [Removed by Forum Team], I can tell you solicitors and accountants were not involved. I asked the bank.  That recording has not been supplied.  One Solicitor was appointed to restore the company.  
I can not afford to take it to court.
I am the Director, appointed following the death of my husband.(2022)
The Independent Assessor told me that the business had broken the law.
The money was deposited by an investment company into the 'client account'.
The company was struck off on 28 March and dissolved on 4 April.  The money was deposited by the investment company and accepted by the bank on 4 April.
The advice that there were no restrictions on the account was 28 March,- it had been struck off.
The missing recording says that as it was not money belonging to the business, the client account would remain safe.  I had closed all the other business accounts.

What I really would like to know, has anyone else had problems with the FOS and banks?

Call recordings are not kept forever. The systems (Servers) are space limited. So old calls get over written, depending on call loads means there is no fixed timescale. 

PHK

Ricecrispies said:

Thank you all for your comments.

Happy Harry asked for the DRN number.  I didn't think it worth including as 75% of it is incorrect.  The Ombudsman 'assumed' and 'thought' to reach his conclusion.  I can tell you the final decision did not include the two points I am now trying to raise. If you read it [Removed by Forum Team], I can tell you solicitors and accountants were not involved. I asked the bank.  That recording has not been supplied.  One Solicitor was appointed to restore the company.  
I can not afford to take it to court.
I am the Director, appointed following the death of my husband.(2022)
The Independent Assessor told me that the business had broken the law.
The money was deposited by an investment company into the 'client account'.
The company was struck off on 28 March and dissolved on 4 April.  The money was deposited by the investment company and accepted by the bank on 4 April.
The advice that there were no restrictions on the account was 28 March,- it had been struck off.
The missing recording says that as it was not money belonging to the business, the client account would remain safe.  I had closed all the other business accounts.

What I really would like to know, has anyone else had problems with the FOS and banks?

The Phoenix number (PNX -) is not the decision number which begins DRN. You should edit out the Phoenix number as it could be used to identify you. 

dumpster_fire2025

Ricecrispies said:

Thank you all for your comments.

Happy Harry asked for the DRN number.  I didn't think it worth including as 75% of it is incorrect.  The Ombudsman 'assumed' and 'thought' to reach his conclusion.  I can tell you the final decision did not include the two points I am now trying to raise. If you read it [Removed by Forum Team], I can tell you solicitors and accountants were not involved. I asked the bank.  That recording has not been supplied.  One Solicitor was appointed to restore the company.  
I can not afford to take it to court.
I am the Director, appointed following the death of my husband.(2022)
The Independent Assessor told me that the business had broken the law.
The money was deposited by an investment company into the 'client account'.
The company was struck off on 28 March and dissolved on 4 April.  The money was deposited by the investment company and accepted by the bank on 4 April.
The advice that there were no restrictions on the account was 28 March,- it had been struck off.
The missing recording says that as it was not money belonging to the business, the client account would remain safe.  I had closed all the other business accounts.

What I really would like to know, has anyone else had problems with the FOS and banks?

It's quite simple really. The Ombudsman is not interested in the law, they are interested in what is considered "fair."

Now it may be that what is considered "fair" and what is considered "the law" are one and the same but it also may not be. I read the DRN posted by MyRealNameToo and based on that I'd say they have not acted unreasonably. But the Ombudsman make pains to clarify that they are not legal professionals and so cannot make decisions based based on the law. If you want a legal adjudication you need to go to court.

MyRealNameToo

dumpster_fire2025 said:

Ricecrispies said:

Thank you all for your comments.

Happy Harry asked for the DRN number.  I didn't think it worth including as 75% of it is incorrect.  The Ombudsman 'assumed' and 'thought' to reach his conclusion.  I can tell you the final decision did not include the two points I am now trying to raise. If you read it PNX-5141697-B4N2, I can tell you solicitors and accountants were not involved. I asked the bank.  That recording has not been supplied.  One Solicitor was appointed to restore the company.  
I can not afford to take it to court.
I am the Director, appointed following the death of my husband.(2022)
The Independent Assessor told me that the business had broken the law.
The money was deposited by an investment company into the 'client account'.
The company was struck off on 28 March and dissolved on 4 April.  The money was deposited by the investment company and accepted by the bank on 4 April.
The advice that there were no restrictions on the account was 28 March,- it had been struck off.
The missing recording says that as it was not money belonging to the business, the client account would remain safe.  I had closed all the other business accounts.

What I really would like to know, has anyone else had problems with the FOS and banks?

It's quite simple really. The Ombudsman is not interested in the law, they are interested in what is considered "fair."

Now it may be that what is considered "fair" and what is considered "the law" are one and the same but it also may not be. I read the DRN posted by MyRealNameToo and based on that I'd say they have not acted unreasonably. But the Ombudsman make pains to clarify that they are not legal professionals and so cannot make decisions based based on the law. If you want a legal adjudication you need to go to court.

The ombudsman probably wouldnt be happy with that explanation... they are interested in what the law states but arent required to blindly follow it, instead they are legally obliged to find fair outcomes. There are various decisions from them pointing out that the law is only one of their considerations but certainly not that there is no interest.

It also depends on the particular ombudsman, there was one S75 claim where the ombudsman went into pages of detail considering the OFT -v- Lloyds case which was about if acquiring banks and similar institutions broke the DCS chain

Ricecrispies

To clarify, I accepted the Ombudsman's decision in January 2025.  The Investigator had told me by email that only one aspect had been considered, 'advice given'.

I was invited to bring a further case with aspects that had not been considered.  The Ombudsman mentioned two in his final decision but there were more, that I assumed he had missed.  His report was so inaccurate I had good reason to think they had been overlooked.

I presented my new case with the points that had not been considered in the previous final decision.  I was asked to bring all the points separately, but later I was informed that they would be considered as one case.  Following this I was told by the new Investigator, for the new case, that she would not consider two major points, the law being broken and the wrong information given - as they had already been investigated. I was also told that anything that was connected to the company being restored would not be investigated.

This is despite her knowing that the information given by the original Investigator was that only one aspect had been looked at, and a Senior Ombudsman, saying that I had previously, not asked for the law being broken to be investigated!  Both the law and the wrong information were in my original letter of complaint to the bank.

These two major points were not in the final decision.  Even if the Ombudsman had 'considered' the law being broken, he is obliged to give good reason for departing from the law.  He didn't appear to know the date of strike off so couldn't possibly have considered the wrong information I was given.

The Investigator will now only consider the minor points:-

the bank not replying to my complaint; 

computerised 'holding' letters being sent regularly to the wrong address, (despite numerous attempts by telephone and letter to rectify the problem);
  
refusal to supply me with copies of the recorded conversations, eventually sending me a transcript of the wrong account, (until I involved the ICO); 

deleted computerised records, of action taken by call handlers during telephone conversations at the bank. 

Irrefutable evidence has been provided either by hard copy or recorded conversation for these minor points and the two major points.

Thank you all, the original question has been answered, it appears no one on this board has had a similar experience.