Product Description

What is IOLTA?

Shortly after financial institutions started giving interest on checking accounts the Interest On Lawyers Trust Accounts program was initiated in Florida by The Florida Bar Foundation. The program was established to accrue the interest from lawyers trust accounts who chose to participate in the program. The funds received would be used to provide the poor with legal aid and provide other financial aid to the legal community. In order to implement the program certain understanding of attorney responsibility, bank procedures and IRS requirements needed to be clarified. The following lists the basic understandings.

• If the interest accrued is sufficient that it can be of benefit to the client then it should be given to the client.
• Interest earned cannot be retained by the attorney, since it is client funds.
• Accrued interest where the principal is determined to be nominal, or the length of the that it will accrue interest is determined to be to short to accrue sufficient interest for the client can be pooled into a single IOLTA account.
• Financial institutions must provide the same rates and charges to IOLTA accounts as they do their regular interest on checking customers.
• Financial institutions must report and remit that interest to the IOLTA program administrator.

What does the software do?

In 1983 The Florida Bar Foundation, as the administrators of the IOLTA program, with the assistance of Arthur Young and IBM, presented the requirements to Roger Lilavois, Inc. for the development of the software to properly administer the program. Over the years the application has evolved to provide efficient administration of IOLTA information. In order to accomplish this the following operational understandings were considered.

• Banks report the interest information
• Law firms are the participants
• Funds are transferred from the banks to the IOLTA administrators account
• Participitation reports and accounting information are needed

Target Users

• A (Interest on Lawyer Trust Accounts) Foundations
• ORETA (Interest on Real Estate Trust Accounts) Foundations
  

Purpose

• To track the interest earned by individual attorneys and law firms or real estate agencies and by the bank
• Provide initial reports necessary for management to project earning and to see if there are any firms or attorneys that are not in compliance
• Provide necessary auditing reports for auditors to track that the funds reported are accurate
  

Method

• Multiple databases for firms, banks, trust accounts, attorneys and history to keep track of what is going on

Input

• Provides the ability to report the interest earned through a standard electronic file that the banks provide
• Banks can read the bank-reporting guide for the format of that file
• Manual input is available for smaller banks

Output

• Can provide ACH transactions to automatically withdraw the funds from those trust accounts and apply them to the organizations, foundations operating account

Additional Features

• Exception reporting when certain interest rates or handling charges or other selected charges are beyond the acceptable normal range, they can be reported
• Exception reports
• Statistical reports
• Auditing reports
• Data analysis reports/data verification reports and for input verification errors