WILLIAM DIVIN -V- ARNTZ BELTING COMPANY LTD

Taxing Master
27 November 2003

In this matter the Plaintiff's Accountants had issued a bill for £2,200 plus VAT for work carried out on the case. We challenged the bill on two grounds. Firstly we objected to the propriety of instructing an Accountant. The Accountants were required to calculate the Plaintiff's pre-accident earnings, net pay post-accident, employer and employee pension contribution and future loss. Such calculations could be easily made through examination of the Defendant's pay sheet and we believed that it did not require the expertise of an Accountant. We also challenged the quantum of the fee in the event the Master found that the Plaintiff was entitled to instruct an Accountant.

The Plaintiff in this case was an operator in Arntz Belting Company Limited since 1975, we had easy access to his wages details, he was a straightforward PAYE worker with no peaks and troughs in relation to his earnings. His earnings details therefore were easily and quickly identifiable. During our submissions to the Master we demonstrated the calculations involved. The pre-accident wages, net pay post-accident and future loss could be calculated within a matter of minutes through the use of the Defendants' pay sheet. Perhaps the most complicated calculation involved the employer contribution to the pension but even this was simply a matter of taking a pre-accident statement, obtaining 3% of this and multiplying it by a given number of weeks. The future loss was easily calculated by using a multiplicand and multiplier. We pointed out to the Master that it had taken less than 5 minutes to outline these simple calculations to him yet the Plaintiff's Accountants charged £2,200 plus VAT for this.

We sought to rely on the case of Carr v Poots in which Lord Justice Carswell had then ruled that it was open to the Taxing Master to refuse to allow the cost of an expert's report if it was clearly of no assistance in the preparation and presentation of the case, or if it unjustifiably duplicated evidence already given. The Plaintiff's Costs Drawer, however, relied on the judgement of Mr Justice McLaughlin in the case of Linton v Warmflow Engineering Company Limited who had stated that "the courts must always insist upon evidence being presented to it in a concise, comprehensible and professional manner." The Master held that he was bound by the ruling in Linton v Warmflow Engineering Company Limited and believed that the Plaintiff was therefore entitled to instruct an Accountant.

The Master did however express concern regarding the quantum of the account. On examining the Accountant's report he commented that while it was indeed presented in a neat and concise manner, it involved a simple exercise of checking wages and deductions and analysing the calculations, a process which would take no longer than a couple of hours. The Plaintiff's Accountants however had billed for 14 hours at £80 per hour for simply preparing computations, a further 2 hours for taking instructions and reading the brief, again charged at the rate of £80 an hour, and finally another 6.5 hours preparing a report to explain their calculations. Following the addition of 2 Partners hours at £120 per hour the bill came to the sum of £2,200. The Master described this as "nonsense"and reduced the bill to £700 plus VAT, allowing 6 hours at £80 for calculations, 1 Senior Partner hour at £120 to check calculations, and another £100 for typing. He reduced Accountant's fee therefore by 68%.