To draw your attention to Mr Bates vs The Post Office

A business like Post Office is dealing in huge amounts of money - almost £1 billion per year. They deal with a lot of clients whose products can be bought or paid for at branches - utilities, DVLA, insurance, Camelot, etc. Some of the figures in the accounts of large businesses will be estimates. There will be errors made that make it impossible to say where every penny came from or went. The requirement is to keep accounts that are reasonably accurate, to safeguard the assets of the business and to take reasonable steps to prevent and detect fraud and other irregularities, not to track every single penny.

I don't know much about running a business but surely even for tax purposes they must have known they were stealing money as don't they have to know where every penny comes from or goes out to ? They must have had to say " Oh look money breeds ." It's almost like money laundering .

Seeing that Stepehen Bradshaw being interviewed, did remind me of the Nuremberg trials. Starting with the lower echelons first.

Hopefully they won’t just make these people the fall guys though.

Still a horrible little man nonetheless

That Stephen Bradshaw -we see another Fraud Investigator with zero training in fraud, the law, or investigative procedures. Another character that started as a counter clerk and ended up in postions of such authority, a significant role, that was a key part of prosecuting and destroying the lives of others. Gleefully taking his bonus and high fiving the rest of his sordid little team,

Julian Blake (lead counsel) keeps giving him a shovel, and instead of smacking himself in the face for a wake up call, he just digs a bigger hole. If he had the slightest whiff of investigative training (or a modicum of common sense) he would see the bear traps being laid, one after the other. He was taking zero responsibility for his actions despite the mountain of evidence thrown at him showing his culpability.

His latest witness statement, the one for the enquiry. "There were no concerns." and "I have no other reflections about this matter." and my favourite. "I do not wish to bring any other matters to the attention of the Chair." Well I think Mr Julian Blake decided otherwise.

"The investigation was conducted in a professional manner at all times." But he tells us that his previous statements produced at court back in 2012 were not really his, he was given them and told to to sign them. Very professional Mr Bradshaw, very professional indeed.

I have yet to see evidence showing me that the Investigation teams at POL were not staffed by unqualified clowns.

You were suggesting changing the law to convict people.

The police have been investigating two Fujitsu employees for perjury for some time. They have been interviewed under caution but no arrests as yet. The inquiry has now widened to look at possible charges of perverting the course of justice and fraud.

I don't think the behaviour was legal at the time, was it? Surely perjury at the very least?

Yes, but retrospective legislation to criminalise behaviour that was legal at the time is rare and is prohibited by the European Convention on Human Rights.

Yes that was interesting wasn't it, that those who questioned being stolen from ended up with larger ammounts being stolen from them and if they didn't agree to this blackmail they were taken to court.

How lovely for the thiefs to have the full backing of the criminal courts behind them to continue pillaging new victim's accounts.

You coudn't make it up.

Quite right.

That's the problem when those who are still in power are dishing out the punishments.

New charges can always be created. The law is an ever changing thing.

The compensation schemes are intended to avoid subpostmasters having to go through the courts. However, there is a criminal investigation going on. This started as an investigation into two Fujitsu employees for perjury. It has now widened and is looking at possible charges of fraud and perverting the course of justice. We don't know who might be charged.

A charge of murder wouldn't stick. It requires the defendant to have directly caused someone's death with the intention to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. I doubt that there is anything senior managers could be charged with in relation to the suicides. Post Office could possibly face a charge of corporate manslaughter, but I'm not convinced that would fly.

Also murder indirectly where people committed suicide.

Surely there is a case for the SPM to bring a case of being defrauded and miscarriage of justice against both the PO and Fujitsu for the cover ups that led to their lives and reputations being devastated. Have listened to most of the Radio 4 series now and watching the Panorama. It beggars belief that capitalism causes such harm. I don't know why I'm surprised at all though.

So post office messes up, the CEO gets a CBE. Fujitsu who provided the system gets hundreds of billions of pounds worth of taxpayer contracts. Keith who was leading public prosecutions when many were wrongly prosecuted, gets to be the next prime minister. Ed Davey, who was literally the govt minister of post office gets to lead a political party.

And the taxpayer has to foot the bill from the scandal.

When are these pieces of crap going to be held accountable?

Indeed. PO seems to have underpaid its tax... while overpaying its executives.

Exec's bonuses were based on a profit figure which carefully ignored all this compensation the PO has been paying out, so was higher than reality.

Meanwhile the PO's profit figure for the taxman carefully included the compensation payouts. However not all costs to a business are tax-deductible, and compensation payouts usually aren't.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67964064

Post Office might have paid too little tax, by claiming reliefs over sums from compensation

https://news.sky.com/story/post-office-could-face-100m-bill-and-insolvency-over-horizon-compensation-tax-relief-expert-claims-13047225

To add to my last post...

Even if Post Office isn't prosecuting people any more, it still has the powers to do so. I would like to see two changes to the law. Firstly, Post Office should lose its powers to prosecute. Secondly, the presumption that computer evidence is accurate should be removed. For me, the second of those is the more important. That presumption gave defendants a mountain to climb to prove their innocence.

Yes, it is still the case. Prosecutions based on Horizon "evidence" stopped in 2015. I haven't been able to find any statistics as to whether there have been any other prosecutions.

The Post Office's prosecution powers go back to 1683, before the police existed. I suspect that no-one ever considered whether it was right for them to retain those powers.

Might of missed it so I do apologise but is it still the case the post office carry out their own criminal investigations rather than involve the police and how on earth was that ever seen as fair?

And another point. That Independent article is dated 10 May 1999. It quotes the Post Office and ICL (Fujitsu) saying "our staff like it" and "Postmasters love it".

But according to p131 of the Oct 2022 inquiry doc I quoted above ( https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-10/POH%2011%20October%202022.pdf ):
Post Office Counters and ICL Pathway [entered] an operational live trial of the Horizon System in late May 1999.

So Horizon wasn't in use even by the small trial group of Postmasters at the time the companies were claiming this.

When it did go into use for a live trial for 11 weeks, with a few hundred users (pp134-135), this was the outcome:

Post Office Counters prepared a hot list, as it was called, of all medium and high severity acceptance incidents observed during the core observation period.
^^
We can see from POL0028355 that as of 13 August 1999 the hot list comprised of three acceptance incidents assessed by Post Office to be of high severity, one acceptance incident assessed by Post Office Counters to be of medium to high severity, and 11 acceptance incidents assessed by Post Office Counters to be of medium severity.

One of the incidents is described on pp135-136:

Post Office Counters' analysis of the data fed into TIP revealed a discrepancy between the volume of transactions recorded by EPOSS at the counter and the branch's weekly cash account, ie the aggregate of the weekly transactions produced by EPOSS. According to Post Office Counters the existence of this discrepancy had only come to light as a result of a temporary function performed by TIP by which it derived a cash account from the transaction data, which had extracted from EPOSS, and compared this to the cash account which had been produced by Horizon.

The Post Office assessed the business impact of this deficiency to be severe.

In the panorama prog it said that Fujitsu’s bid was considered one of the lower ones (7th out of 9) but it was cheapest.

Whereas this is the evidence submitted to the current inquiry (October 2022):

https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-10/POH%2011%20October%202022.pdf

However, in a briefing from the Treasury to the Prime Minister's office, dated
23 April 1999, there can be found a document entitled "ICL Pathway: list of failures", in which the following is recorded.
[...]
So "ICL Pathway: list of failures", this a briefing from the Treasury to the Prime Minister:
"Independent reviews of the Horizon project by external IT experts have all concluded (most recently this week) that ICL Pathway have failed and are failing to meet good industry practice in taking this project forward, both in their software development work and in their management of the process.
"To date in the development stages of the project: "All planned release dates have been missed, including the key contractual milestone for completion of the operational trial, which ICL Pathway were placed in breach in November 1997 ..."
[...]
"Every release has been subject to reductions in the originally plant functionality."
Next bullet point:
"And even when each release has gone live, there have been faults and problems which have resulted in the need for Pathway to reimburse DSS."
Next bullet point:
"In the current trials, the known problems have risen from 46 in November 1998 to 139 at the end of March 1999; and currently 146 have not been resolved."

A couple more features spring out from that 1999 Independent article about the ICL-Fujitsu-Pathway-Horizon-Post Office disaster already well underway at that date.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/icl-stumbles-on-pathway-to-hell-1092947.html

One is that the assumption in 1999 was that PFI projects like Pathway-Horizon transferred risk from the public to the private sector. But it was already clear this just wasn't true, because as (Fujitsu-owned) ICL's costs mounted, the company held the govt to ransom by demanding higher "toll" payments.

Another is that even in May 1999, the Post Office and ICL (Fujitsu) were publicly praising the system to the skies, despite all evidence to the contrary. As the article says:

John Roberts, chief executive of the Post Office, said: "This is a key project and one that we want to see go ahead. The system works and our staff like it.[...]"
[...]
John Bennett, managing director of ICL Pathway, is adamant that the system will operate satisfactorily. "We have had the system independently audited and it was best in the class of any commercial system. In fact, it is probably achieving military standards of security," he said.

All the while the project has hung in the balance, ICL has remained remarkably confident about its future. Even now, as the storm clouds gather, it remains extraordinarily relaxed. "We are looking forward to the outcome of the review positively," says the spokeswoman. "There is no chance of the project being canned. Postmasters love it, the customer loves it. Why would anyone want to axe a project which is so successful?"

Shocking that the govt have blocked requests for info about the new proposals. And v interesting that Horizon was developed for benefit claimants. assumed to be on the fiddle.
maybe they should use it for MP expenses..

As with what's emerging about Horizon, accountants can already see the problems and are aghast. See Richard Murphy's blog post:

https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/tax/hmrc-policy/government-seeks-to-view-claimants-bank-accounts#:~:text=Data%20collection%20could%20start%20from,thinks%20this%20an%20easy%20exercise.

There was almost no Parliamentary time allocated to discuss any of that proposed legislation, but included in it, starting at page 98, was a provision that impacts every practicing accountant and many of their clients quite significantly.

On that page a new clause 121DB was added to the Social Security Administration Act 1992, saying: “Schedule 3B makes provision about a power for the Secretary of State to obtain account information.”
If passed (and that is not certain, as the Lords are likely to have a great deal to say about this, if given the chance) the new Schedule 3B empowers the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who administers social security, to compel banks to provide any data that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) demands so that it might search for fraud and error on the part of benefit claimants.

Crucially, this is not an investigative power taken so that fraud might be pursued when there is reasonable belief and prior evidence that it might be taking place. Instead, this is a general power, permitting the DWP, which now administers benefit payments, to request that banks that receive such payments provide information on the bank accounts of all benefit recipients on a regular and recurring basis.

State pensioners included
It was suggested at first that the power would be used to demand information on the bank accounts of universal credit, pension credit and employment and support allowance claimants. That is approximately 8.8m people. But then Stephen Timms, a veteran Labour MP, realised that the power extended to everyone in receipt of a state pension as well, and raised the issue in the Commons.

That extends the right to collect data to another 11m or so people (having allowed for those already claiming pension credit). Other benefits are also covered. Child benefit, widely claimed by the clients of many accountants, could be on that list.

Extraordinarily, most of these covered by the new provision will be in receipt of benefits that are not earnings-related when it comes to determining entitlement. Given that many disability benefits also seem to be covered, many are also not linked to savings. Well over 10m people will have their bank account details sent to the government under this legislation on a regular basis, even though the data supplied cannot in any way impact their entitlement to the benefit that they are paid.