MOJ Portal Misery

This is getting silly now

This week we have unearthed the following gremlins and black holes within the MOJ Portal:

There is NO mechanism within the portal process to deal with Pre Medical offers - no one thought to tell the MOJ planning team about the insurers tactic of making daft offers early on to settle claims quickly and cheaply. Such offers are outside of the overriding objective of the portal process yet the tactic is widely adopted by insurers. If your client accepts a pre-med offer the system doesnt allow you to settle formally (save sending a memo or notification). This settlement method may account for 10% of cases as insurers throw money at clients early and also offer to pay stage 1 & 2 costs to boot.

Did no one think of this..?

The 2nd major headache this week has been the constantly populating "unlocked" worklist which means that our team of registered users all receive the same items of post (notifications) through the portal. You cannot lock a case completely to a user - the system unlocks it once the other side are active and communicate with you. The MOJ team didnt think we would need complete file ownership. This makes no sense whatsoever. Its like your post room staff walking into your office and distributing the same letters to everyone at the same time leaving them to work out which item belongs to them.

Finally this weeks trauma was increased markedly by a portal helpdesk team consisting entirely of overly emotional teenage dimwits. I say emotional because generally they are by the time weve finished with them. Dont bother emailing the helpdesk - you will not get a reply. Instead if you have an MOJ Portal problem you must ring them and ask to speak to a senior member of staff. It really is the only way to get any sense out of these people.

In summary, 2 months in - its as bad as bad can be.

Rapid Claims MOJ Portal Update

Allow me to continue venting my spleen regarding the shambles that is the MOJ RTA claims portal.

Now that we are finally using the damn thing we have identified the following (additional) flaws:

- The system looks like a 1980's intranet for a crap university

- There are no filters whatsoever on the data columns

- No clickable / sortable fields

- No reporting mechanisms (in other words to extract data for management information)

- Bizarre referencing with half the screen taken up with meaningless process id numbers

- No user instruction manuals (we really dont have these)

- The insurers when you speak to the claims handlers, have very little idea of what they are doing

- Insurer backlogs are increasing as a result

As if all this wasnt enough, word has it that certain insurers are going hell for eather trying to settle claims inside the first window minimising costs to £400 + vat.

More misery updates to follow no doubt

Polish migrants in the UK

We have an interest in Polish legal matters and it would seem there is a complete lack of information for Poles who come to live and work in the UK.

I have come across a new blog which highlights the issues facing Polish migrants in the uk and also this Polish information blog it is good to see the advice gap being filled for the (unofficial total) 750,000 ex pats working in this country.

You have to work in the industry with Polish nationals to realise just how badly treated they are in this country. Whilst you can understand some of the obvious problems that would arise when being domiciled in a foreign land, in the majority of cases we find that clients are abused at work by unscrupulous bosses and then at home by dodgy landlords.

Thats 21st century Britain for you. Aint it just great...!