£1.8m legal aid fraud to be repaid

SLAB report reveals that money will be paid back by January 2008

News, 3 October 2007

A legal aid fraud involving almost £2 million of public money will be repaid by the end of January 2008.

The settlement is disclosed in the Scottish Legal Aid Board’s annual report published this week. The case relates to solicitor James Muir, the sole practitioner at a firm in Lanarkshire, who was paid £1.8 million for legal aid work over seven years.

Mr Muir was said to have "embellished" cases involving children's legal aid into child abuse cases. The matter was reported to the police, but the solicitor committed suicide in 2005.

When the abuse of the system came to light, the Board “urgently undertook a review to ensure that the case was an isolated one, and fortified our controls to minimise the risk of a reoccurrence”.

SLAB worked with the Scottish Ministers’ Civil Recovery Unit to recover the loss and an agreement has been signed by the solicitor’s family and the law firm in which he worked that will effect recovery, with no loss to public funds.

More recent work to detect legal aid abuses in 2006-2007 set out in the report reveals that SLAB:

terminated or refused legal aid in 227 cases as a result of investigations into applicants’ financial circumstances;
reported 30 individuals to the procurator fiscal, as a result of which the courts imposed community service orders, fines and compensation orders;
made complaints about two solicitors to the Law Society of Scotland;
de-registered two firms and two solicitors from the Criminal Legal Assistance Register;
made savings and recoveries as a result of applicant and solicitor investigations activities in excess of £2.1 million.