Time taken by the SIA to confirm ACS eligibility
Published 15 October 2021
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1. Request
Please can you tell me:
- how long it takes for a company to receive the letter of eligibility for the ACS at the moment?
- has covid caused any delays?
2. Response
I can confirm that we do hold the information you requested.
2.1 How long it takes
The Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is for “75% of ACS applications to receive an acceptance decision within 3 months, where there are no HMRC or Compliance and Inspections enquiries”. Between the period April 2020 – September 2021 there was 100% compliance with this KPI. Below is a table showing the ACS applications received in this period.
| ACS applications that received eligibility decision | 69 | |
| Withdrawn | 2 | |
| Total to be considered | 67 | 100% |
| Decided within 90 days | 18 | 27% |
| Delayed by an ongoing HMRC or C&I enquiry | 49 | 73% |
2.2 Has covid caused any delays?
In March 2020, a decision was made by the SIA’s executive management team that the SIA would temporarily cease accepting new applications to join the ACS, due to the pandemic’s impact on the SIA’s ability to conduct visits if required. The SIA began to accept ACS applications once again in June 2020, three months later.
Once an ACS application is submitted along with the required documentation, and the application fee is paid, the team writes to confirm that the application has been accepted and the due diligence checks begin. Given that our staff shifted without interruption from office-based to remote working, COVID has not had an impact on the team carrying out this process as all were able to continue to receive and process new applications while working from home. We had already introduced the requirement, prior to the pandemic, for ACS applicants to set up an online business account and submit their application via that.
The next stage is a pre-acceptance interview which is either conducted over the phone or a member of staff may need to visit the company premises. The interview covers questions to inform our assessment of the company’s compliance with the fit and proper conditions of the ACS. This assessment is based on the information that has been provided on the application. Some difficulties were encountered at this stage as many companies could not be contacted as they had either furloughed staff or closed their offices as a result of the pandemic. If a face-to-face visit on site was necessary, then social distancing measures and the vulnerability of either the applicant’s or the SIA’s staff had to be taken into account and caused delay to some applications.
[Reference: FOI 0287]