ILR Success at PEO Croydon

[ellabranker]

I applied for ILR as main applicant and for my husband as dependent.
Completed Set O Application. As I am self employed and on maternity leave, I left blank the section on current income.

Earnings
Because the earnings period for which I claimed points covered a combination of salaried employment (2 months) and self employed (contracted -10 months), I submitted 2 payslips for while employed and 10 letters/stamped invoices/remittances/payment advices. I worked as a locum doctor, so I submitted the original bill from HMRC for Class 2 NIC for last quarter. I also photocopied the page on my bank statement where the deduction was made. For the period for which I was self employed, I got an accountancy firm to write a letter stating that I earned the exact amounts in my bank account compared with the invoices I submitted to the surgeries.
The case worker seemed very incompetent as she took at least 3 hours to go through my documents. She came back to me at least twice as she didn’t know how the payments were made, whether by cheque or BACS. I highlighted all of these things on my bank statements which also states if a cheque was deposited. The accountant also provided an appendix breaking down the date and amount deposited as income for each payment I received. Luckily all the BACS payment descriptions listed the surgery’s name and the cheques were not for flush amounts like £1000 but for like £1000.57 and everything matched to a T. But still she could not make sense of such a simple process. I thought it was fools proof. But maybe in retrospect I should have written a very long detailed letter explaining everything like if I were talking to a child.

Then she went to a few of her colleagues for help and it started to bother me as I was wondering if she was going to refuse my application. I could see her typing up the payments on Excel, but I think what confused the matter was that some of the surgeries sent back to me with their letters, the invoices that I sent to them. I had to submit these as their letters stated that they were attached. Because I worked over a period of months for various surgeries, I received a number of payments as I submitted a number of invoices. The letters from the surgeries stated totals, so the case worker had to get the total by adding up, sometimes 3 invoice payments (500+750+250=1500). Maybe this complicated matters.

Now I have to admit that the accountancy firm that I used never wrote a letter like this and the guidance notes from UKBA weren’t very clear. This firm does not usually do my accounting for me, so the letter was filled with disclaimers. In the end, I asked her what was wrong with the Accountant’s letter as I thought it might have been my downfall, and she said, she took so long as she needed someone to check their database to see if it met their registration criteria and was on their list.

Everything else was fine because my case was a combination of HSMP +Tier 1. The cohab docs I submitted were fine, as she told me to stop after I gave some to her covering the two years. In the end, she took about 30 mins to photocopy them.

At close to 6pm, after arriving at 12:00 for a 12:30 appointment, she called me and she told me it was approved.

What should I have done differently?
• Make sure accountancy firm was registered with UKBA
• Make sure every letter from surgery breaks down each payment.

Appointment: 12:30
Biometrics worked. Received cards in post 4 days later.

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