Firms who were due to submit their returns by 11 August were granted an extension of 30 days, with the new deadline 9 September.
Robin Gordon-Walker, spokesperson at the FSA, revealed the precise figures for submission were not yet available but said a large percentage of brokers did submit their RMARs on time.
However, one source has suggested the industry will be disappointed by the number of brokers who failed to get the reports in by 9 September and said it certainly wasn’t a 100 per cent clean record.
This would spell trouble for the offending firms who were late or did not submit a report at all. The FSA has given numerous warnings that failure to submit the reports by the deadline would result in the firm being charged an administrative fee of £250. The FSA is also entitled to take enforcement action if a firm fails to submit a return.
However, brokers have been quick to lay some of the blame at the FSA’s door. The returns must be submitted via its ‘Firms Online’
system but the system has been experiencing numerous technical difficulties. MI revealed in August how some firms could not even get onto the system to access the forms.
A broker at Cornwall-based broker firm Harris Begley told MI this week: “There I was getting all nervous about accessing our first online RMAR, gathering the data, teeing-up the accountant for doing a year’s interim accounts breakdown for us, and guess what?
The site says: ‘Due to a planned upgrade you will not be able to access Firms Online during 3 and 4 October’. Whatever happened to weekend upgrades of systems?”
