To draw your attention to Mr Bates vs The Post Office

So we know the computer system could bankrupt postmasters, could it work the other way, whereby some sub postmasters were credited instead ?
Yes, sort of. The former Postmaster and CWU rep gave an example on the podcast. A SPM was away and a manager covered. When IIRC £27K landed that the branch it shouldn't have had he trousered it. It was due to a Horizon error, the money was allocated wrongly. So no electronic record made at that branch, which of course left the branch that should have had it £27K down.
In that case the PO did notice and he got caught. We can take from that that the PO only ever did due diligence when it suited them.
And don't forget with all of this the 'thefts' from PO branches had to be in hard cash, there was no way of making digital transfers. Which made the idea of a small PO being thousands down even more risible.

Just finished watching. I'm sick to the stomach. Honestly, most of the stories are the most harrowing I've ever heard. Innocent people investigated, convicted of crimes they didn't commit. Innocent people who took their own lives. Innocent people whose lives were wrecked by the stress and worry.

I never want to use the post office facilities again but in doing so, it's the SPM's that get affected.

Just utterly shocking.

So we know the computer system could bankrupt postmasters, could it work the other way, whereby some sub postmasters were credited instead ?

That's a really interesting question. Supposing Horizon had somehow balanced a SPM's accounts wrongly so that they were £50K in credit, would the PO have insisted that Horizon was robust, so it must be their (the SPM's) money and thus told them to take it? I think I can guess...

The recuse request really is the icing on the PO's great big turd-cake. Stamping your feet and demanding that the person who has listened to all of the evidence must be biased against you, because they have come to the logical conclusion that you were in the wrong and must therefore be replaced by somebody who hasn't heard all of the facts, is ridiculous and toddler-like in the extreme.

Finding you guilty as a result of a great amount of very conclusive evidence against you is justice. In fact, regardless of the individuals involved, it's kind of the whole point of it that the justice system is supposed to be biased against proven crime!

So essentially the employees at Fujitsu, Horizon could move money around like God, what if imaginery accounts could be made up to recieve these profits.

I can't believe there hasn't been a thorough forensic accountancy body to check all PO accounts and Fujitsu accounts.

Absolutely no faith if questions are not answered.

On the podcast linked upthread, the "reconciliation" of accounts was done by Horizon. They did indeed make credits to sub post masters. However, one of the numerous glitches on the system was that they sometimes credited the wrong post master! The wrongful recipient would have been none the wiser, he or she would have just thought they had got it wrong and the computer was correcting their mistake. Meanwhile, the correct recipient was out of pocket. The whole thing was a shambles.

Horizon didn't give the subpostmaster the kind of reports that would allow them to do this. Post Office took the view that any shortfall that Horizon showed was money owed to Post Office by the subpostmaster with no further evidence required. The courts supported Post Office.

Got it. Thank you. I should have paid more attention.

Yes exactly. Actually Alan Bates who was familiar with computer accounting systems asked the PO for access to run queries on his data to try to trace the source of the errors, but he was denied.
He transferred the incorrect balances to a suspense account to make the main accounts balance, but the PO fired him and took away the ability to move the values into a suspense account later.
The only audit available was of the transaction log - but when that log didn't agree to the cash and stock at hand the PO instantly assumed the missing cash had been stolen, rather than accept the log could be wrong.

Thank you @theresnoonequitelikegrandma, that sounds deranged but I suppose if your employer/contractor imposes a substantial system on you with no alternative but to use it, that explains it. And they couldn't afford to say so and walk away. Unbelievably exploitative.

My understanding is that the postmasters had no way of checking and reviewing the transactions once they had 'pressed the button' to send the information to Horizon which is why they were living in fear of what might happen once an initial loss had appeared.

The more I find out about this, the more horrified I am about the total lack of any common sense on the part of the post office, let alone any kind of compassion or understanding.

Take some very deep breaths first @Mamabear2424 , you wi.l be fizzing with anger by the end of it.

someone told me about this today will look it up,

It was really upsetting watching the ITV drama and even more so the real documentary afterwards. Utterly tragic and heartbreaking, the pain and misery caused by The Post Office, Fujitsu and initially the Justice system. It's difficult to fathom the number of people that must have been complicit in this and couldn't or wouldn't speak up. I hope there is more damning evidence to come out in relation to Paula Vennells and Fujitsu. Sadly no senior people in either organisation will take responsibility, they've probably already got scapegoats lined up.

I've got a question which must have been answered in the programme but I've missed it. If, at the end of the day, counting up takings, if I was missing a few thousand I'd match transactions until I located the loss. I don't understand how such large losses could show with nothing to back them up. Its like me saying to one of you, well you owe me 10k and expecting you to suck it up unquestioningly. What did I miss?

Institutions will fight tooth and nail to protect the institution at the expense of any of us little people involved. Running through a few we all know about. Thalidomide. Hillsborough. Infected Blood. Various NHS scandals. Assorted Police Forces, Stephen Laurence, Daniel Morgan, Spy in the Suitcase to name but a few. Information about all of these extracted reluctantly, inch by inch, til truth could no longer be denied. Paula V will use the excuse of collaborators through the ages, I was only following orders, not my fault. The Post Office lawyers asked the judge to recuse- remove - himself from the trial as he was biased against the Post Office! Utter hubristic delusion, I'm so glad he declined to do so. Like everyone else, I can't even articulate the contempt I feel for all the conspirators. It was a conspiracy. They should all be arrested and imprisoned. And Paula is probably still feeling fully entitled to an eventual seat in the House of Lords due to her 'extensive business experience and sterling work in the community'. Makes me want to spit which is something I don't do.

I read Nick Wallis's book and that was enough for me.

Although some of those affected were employees at the Crown post offices. From memory I think the young woman Tracey who was about 19 when it kicked off for her was an employee in a Crown Post office? Her life was ruined by all this as well.

Exactly... my husband was a sub post master and we have just chatted about this. The biggest error he had was about £50 so just took it in the chin..You got no help with phoning the help line.

@FatherJackHackettsUnderpantsHamper

With a corrupt system and ability to enter postmasters accounts unknowingly how much corruption was possible.

So we know the computer system could bankrupt postmasters, could it work the other way, whereby some sub postmasters were credited instead ?

All accounting needs to be looked at from beggining to end, as to where the money went.

Absolute shambles.

This could be the tip of the iceburg.

Just watching episode 1, what an absolutely disgraceful scandal, those poor people.

One thing amazes me. Given how many PO and Fujitsu staff must have known the system was shit and causing problems how on earth did they think that they could weather the storm by doubling down on bullying the SPM?
Surely there must have been senior managers who realised this was like some mad pyramid scheme and guaranteed to collapse eventually. Sure some maybe thought if they toed the party line until they left they'd be home free but where are the senior managers who knew and were queasy about it all? The clips of witnesses in the ITV documentary shows them all having very selective amnesia - like we don't think they are lying to save their sorry arses. Shame on them.

I disagree. Whilst there are indeed plenty more people who should face trial and consequences, she took the shilling and happily defended the indefensible so as to protect the 'honour' of the post office - which just so happened to earn her a huge payout and a CBE into the bargain.

She had the power to stand up and acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that there were serious issues and demand that they all be thoroughly, properly investigated. She could have proven herself blameless in determining to get to the bottom of it, as soon as the problem came to light, and seeking a resolution and justice for everybody; instead of being the rightful object of people's fury, she would have been applauded by the 'little' majority.

Of course, she would have lost a lot and fallen drastically out of favour with the high-up people, had she done so, but this is the price you have to pay for following your conscience and standing up for what is right. She could have done the honourable thing, but instead, she chose to take the money and to please the corrupt elite, and throw countless innocent people under the bus to pay for her greed.

The PO have clung on to the flimsy justification for all this time that a great many sub post offices used Horizon perfectly fine and without issue for years, so this was 'proof' that the system wasn't intrinsically broken.

However, aside from the fact that a huge amount of things that are irreparably damaged do routinely (wholly unreliably) work some of the time, I'm wondering how many more issues have gone under the radar.

How many as-yet-unidentified SPMs had issues whereby the same faults that Horizon caused happened to be to the tune of much lower amounts, and so they either ignored it as 'I must have entered something wrongly' and/or they just put in the £20 here and there themselves to balance it off? They would have known that they would probably have been blamed and shamed for incompetence and/or attempted fraud; raising the alarm was hardly a neutral act.

Considering how many of the SPMs who did go public about it were originally threatened and gaslighted into believing that they were the only ones experiencing the issue, I absolutely cannot accept that the lack of far more people reporting Horizon issues is 'proof' that there weren't far more people going through it.

So many destroyed lives and yet so much decency and courage too.

I'd like the CPS to investigate whether there was a criminal conspiracy between PO and Fujitsu.

Once Horizon was implemented, hundreds of hitherto (some for decades) upstanding sub post masters were suddenly "exposed" as thieves and false accountants. At the same time, these people were complaining that Horizon was giving them deficit figures that made no sense (certainly in the case of tiny village post offices, implying that they had stolen more than they could possibly have taken at the till in the first place). Fujitsu and the PO were telling these people they were the only one complaining about Horizon (a blatant lie), whilst knowing something was not right because of the number of complaints, and indeed had a technical crew making corrections and adjustments that the sub post masters had no notice of. There is evidence that at least one woman was criminally prosecuted by the PO, when the PO knew they had no evidence against her. She won't be the only one. They took her money knowing she didn't owe it. There's so much evidence not shown in the dramatisation about what a mess the Horizon system was, and how the PO and Fujitsu denied this, whilst continuing to prosecute what they must have known to be dubious prosecutions, with the intent of getting the sub post masters' own money out of them and using threats of incarceration in order to do so.

I mean, we are warned continually about scammers. But this is, in effect, scamming.