Solicitors hit back this week at claims that they have been overpaid by nearly £25m for legal aid work, blaming the ‘mountain of bureaucracy’ they face from the Legal Services Commission.

A report by the National Audit Office said the LSC had overpaid solicitors by an estimated £24.7m in 2008-09. The report said £18.3m had been ‘overclaimed’ by the profession, while £6.4m had been ‘erroneously’ paid to solicitors where there was no evidence that their clients were actually entitled to legal aid.

The highest level of financial error was in relation to family and immigration claims, where 25% of the claims examined were incorrect or unsupported, it added.

Edward Leigh MP (pictured), chairman of the Commons public accounts committee, said there was something ‘particularly unsettling’ about the overpayments. ‘This is a profession famed for its skill in mastering the finer details of an issue, and for a forensic understanding of what action is permitted and what is not,’ Leigh said. ‘We expect to see solicitors subjecting their own claims to a similar level of scrutiny.’

Leigh said solicitors should be more careful when making claims, and the LSC should develop better controls and be ‘less shy’ in imposing sanctions on those who make incorrect claims.

However, Roy Morgan, chairman of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, said a ‘mountain of bureaucracy’ was to blame for overpayments. He said: ‘Micromanagement of casework has resulted in a level of complexity so great that one may wonder how any case is progressed and any bill ever gets paid. Four ring binders explain to legal aid providers what rules to follow to run their cases along with regular updated guidance on the LSC website.’

Morgan said the amount of the estimated overpayments was ‘completely overshadowed’ by the many millions of pounds owed to lawyers by the LSC for work in progress, some of whom cannot submit bills for cases that have lasted years.

The Law Society disputed the findings of the NAO report. Legal aid manager Richard Miller said: ‘Our experience is that people without knowledge of the system who try to audit files do not fully understand the work done by lawyers or the system under which they operate.’

He added that solicitors may have made ‘genuine errors’ due to the frequent changes to the LSC rules and its ‘confusing and contradictory guidance’.

Karen Mackay, chief executive of family lawyers group Resolution, said: ‘The legal aid system is enormously complicated. There’s a huge lack of clarity about what solicitors can and cannot claim for. The guidance is not clear and not applied consistently throughout the regions.’