Mr Bates and the Post Office

onomatopoeia said:
Anyone can bring a private prosecution, you don't have to be a prosecuting authority. The disclosure rules are the same, the courts are the same, the laws are the same whoever brings the prosecution. We've only had a CPS for about 40 years,
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Thanks for that. I did a check to see how to do it...ie a private prosecution and the government website states this..

Their bold:

1. Bringing a private prosecution is difficult​

It’s important to note that bringing a private prosecution is a serious and difficult step. Those thinking of bringing a private prosecution are strongly advised to seek independent legal advice from a qualified lawyer first.

Beyond that .."A judge, magistrate, or justices’ legal adviser at the court will make a decision based on the information in the application form, not in a hearing. This means that the form must be completed in full and must disclose all relevant information. If all relevant information is not disclosed or if inaccurate information is disclosed, the application could be refused or the case could be dismissed later on"
 
Box Brownie said:
Hmmm! and in the past 25 years how many ministers have there been of any/all parties who had oversight of the Post Office ???

Did the PO & Fujitsu Horizon scandal start & end during the coalition government ?
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It certainly didn't start then. It started in 1999, when the Blair government were in power and "Things could only get better", not it seems for the sub postmasters , 900 of whom were prosecuted. This is corruption on the highest scale, which transcends any political allegience.

en.wikipedia.org

British Post Office scandal - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
As well as the questions bring asked, I'd ask:

What was the fraud rate was before Horizon. Was there a big jump when Horizon was installed? If so, why?
How many Postmasters were there? Looks like under 9,000. So 10% of your postmasters are crooks?! Something up with your recruitment there...
If there is all this thievery - what about the ill-gotten gains? Any proof that these people suddenly had more disposable cash, after you thought Horizon showed they were thieves.

Utter failure of 'management'.
 
I wonder what the total amount of shortfall payments that the sub-postmasters were forced to pay out of their own pockets amounted to? We hear individual stories of c£44k, £66k etc and with potentially thousands of cases then this amounts to a big enough sum that the finance department would surely have puzzled where it was coming from?
 
delb0y said:
I wonder what the total amount of shortfall payments that the sub-postmasters were forced to pay out of their own pockets amounted to? We hear individual stories of c£44k, £66k etc and with potentially thousands of cases then this amounts to a big enough sum that the finance department would surely have puzzled where it was coming from?
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And the follow on question is "where did it go?"

Police are on to this.
 
Pound Coin said:
As well as the questions bring asked, I'd ask:

What was the fraud rate was before Horizon. Was there a big jump when Horizon was installed? If so, why?
How many Postmasters were there? Looks like under 9,000. So 10% of your postmasters are crooks?! Something up with your recruitment there...
If there is all this thievery - what about the ill-gotten gains? Any proof that these people suddenly had more disposable cash, after you thought Horizon showed they were thieves.

Utter failure of 'management'.
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We may all be missing the point here.
The post office has its own investigation department, their people will be expert at catching postmen who steal postal orders, and will know a thing or two about physical security - but computers and fraud?

Their bosses presumably told them that nobody except the sub-postmaster has access to the computer, and that the money is missing, so end of story. No professional curiosity, nothing to see here, just take them to Court.

Little or no professional curiosity from most of the judges either, they probably assumed that the evidential standard was similar to that of the CPS and that the money actually was missing.

As for defence solicitors and barristers, legal aid rates are very low and don't encourage avoidable work.
Peter123 said:
And the follow on question is "where did it go?"

Police are on to this.
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The police don't understand fraud either, they have their own specialist department that specialises in not investigating fraud, see https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/online-fraud-problem.755017/
 
Peter123 said:
And the follow on question is "where did it go?"
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That opens a whole new can of worms.

Why did the auditors sign off the accounts, when there must have been amounts which didn't agree with the ledgers? There are so many loose ends here, you could knit a jumper for the Blackpool Tower with them!
 
Garry Edwards said:
We may all be missing the point here.
The post office has its own investigation department, their people will be expert at catching postmen who steal postal orders, and will know a thing or two about physical security - but computers and fraud?

Post Office fraud investigators were offered bonuses to secure convictions, and if you are accused of fraud as a Post Office employee, it is not so much of an investigation, rather a Police style interrogation complete with recording the interview to get you to confess you stole the money.
That is part of the issue the accused have faced. Having secured the confession, there will then be a court appearance, where "you, John Doe have confessed to theft, I rest my case "
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Someone commented regarding tactics like Regan in the Sweeney, my reply is more like an episode from 1984
 
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AndrewFlannigan said:
That opens a whole new can of worms.

Why did the auditors sign off the accounts, when there must have been amounts which didn't agree with the ledgers? There are so many loose ends here, you could knit a jumper for the Blackpool Tower with them!
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The Post Office has one till, one person. Nobody else has access. Therefore, if it is audited and found to be short, then you must have taken the money QED
 
Rishi sunak Monday /tues oh this is bad we will give it top priority and get it sorted a.s.a.p

Rishi sunak thurs/fri sh** thats a lot of compensation .I know lets start a war to cause a distraction :eek: :pompous: :wacky:
 
So the post office has provided £50k worth of stamps and postal orders and pension payments and what have you to a sub post office. When the monies come back in at £100k (after the poor post mistress has had to top up takings by mortgaging her parents' house) didn't someone in accounting notice, and wonder where all this extra revenue was coming from? Especially as many of the stamps and postal orders were still in stock and especially when the situation occurred a thousand times in different locations. I couldn't even get our accounting team to let me round up (or down) the mileage to a whole number on expenses claim.
 
delb0y said:
So the post office has provided £50k worth of stamps and postal orders and pension payments and what have you to a sub post office. When the monies come back in at £100k (after the poor post mistress has had to top up takings by mortgaging her parents' house) didn't someone in accounting notice, and wonder where all this extra revenue was coming from? Especially as many of the stamps and postal orders were still in stock and especially when the situation occurred a thousand times in different locations. I couldn't even get our accounting team to let me round up (or down) the mileage to a whole number on expenses claim.
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I think you'll find the post office is a bit more than selling x number of stamps for x amount of money. Theres banking, cash deposits, cash withdrawals, pensions, postal orders and various other services the post office provides. Horizon could have been buggering up any one of these with the wrong amounts to cause a shortfall in cash.

I do agree that somebody somewhere should have thought to themselves it odd that all of a sudden they had employed so many fraudsters. In fact it appears they did but tried to cover it up.
 
kennethwfd said:
The Post Office has one till, one person. Nobody else has access. Therefore, if it is audited and found to be short, then you must have taken the money QED
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And this is the key breakdown of the PO & Horizon 'position'!

As @Garry Edwards said the lack of investigative curiosity is at the core of the matter (as in many publicly discussed things in the past) the fact that Fujitsu had programmed in remote access without the knowledge of the sub postmasters and apparently(?) also without the knowledge of some/many in the PO management hierarchy???

The same lack of curiosity was, indirectly, commented on by Lord Arbuthnot.....talking of how implausible it was that so many branch/sub postmasters were fiddling the tills......that no one asked why so many were being identified!

I am pleased that some increasing focus is now being put into investigations of both the PO and Fujitsu is gaining a bit of momentum ;)

As for the process...the testimony of the investigator yesterday at the enquiry, his lack of interest & inquiry but the prescriptive approach to the investigation was arguably a mitigating factor in what lead to the miscarriage of justice. He saying he was not technically knowledgeable and no one higher up said the Horizon system could be at fault........ :headbang:
 
kennethwfd said:
The Post Office has one till, one person. Nobody else has access. Therefore, if it is audited and found to be short, then you must have taken the money QED
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You may have missed my point...

Most of the accused had done nothing wrong, so there had to be "too much" money sloshing around in the integrated accounts and someone in the auditors ought to have wondered whence the excess had come. In such a case, why were the accounts signed off?

Of course, you may just have been deploying sarcasm... :thinking:
 
I wonder if Horizon ever gained money as well as lost it?

I don't see how the PO can be allowed to "mark its own homework" anyway, that's an obvious trail to disaster.
 
ecoleman said:
I think you'll find the post office is a bit more than selling x number of stamps for x amount of money. Theres banking, cash deposits, cash withdrawals, pensions, postal orders and various other services the post office provides. Horizon could have been buggering up any one of these with the wrong amounts to cause a shortfall in cash.

I do agree that somebody somewhere should have thought to themselves it odd that all of a sudden they had employed so many fraudsters. In fact it appears they did but tried to cover it up.
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The Horizon software flags up any "shortfalls"
Those affected protested their innocence but were ignored, it was assumed that the software was infallible.
Now the truth is coming out, the whole affair stinks.
As an ex PO employee, I am glad that I got out when I had the chance.
 
the black fox said:
Rishi sunak Monday /tues oh this is bad we will give it top priority and get it sorted a.s.a.p

Rishi sunak thurs/fri sh** thats a lot of compensation .I know lets start a war to cause a distraction :eek: :pompous: :wacky:
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And the taxpayer - meaning you and I,- will pick up the tab
 
I heard on the news a short while ago that Fujitsu UK have declared a loss of IIRC £73m this year compared to a profit (again IIRC) of £93m last year.

The whole affair perhaps does not bode well for their UK survival???
 
Box Brownie said:
I heard on the news a short while ago that Fujitsu UK have declared a loss of IIRC £73m this year compared to a profit (again IIRC) of £93m last year.

The whole affair perhaps does not bode well for their UK survival???
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That was probably due to the brown envelopes they had to give out!!
 
AndrewFlannigan said:
You may have missed my point...

Most of the accused had done nothing wrong, so there had to be "too much" money sloshing around in the integrated accounts and someone in the auditors ought to have wondered whence the excess had come. In such a case, why were the accounts signed off?

Of course, you may just have been deploying sarcasm... :thinking:
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It's entirely possible that the software created 'reasons' for the money to be missing in the form of apparent sales and financial activity that never actually happened. In such a case the money really would appear to be missing from an accounting POV. It may also be that someone had found a way to exfiltrate large amounts of money from the system using virtual transactions, but that's not a possibility I'm seeing mentioned at the moment. The thing is that if Fujitsu staff could access individual accounts, so could anyone else who could operate the system at that level, so the thefts taking place were genuine but not by the accused.

However AFAIK it WAS a software fault.
 
delb0y said:
But someone, maybe the Post Office overall, has pocketed all the extra cash. If nothing else, bonuses were no doubt paid on the marvellous profits.
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I quite agree that profits should have been much high thanks to a zero COG, but imagination is something that appears to have been strictly forbidden in PO systems.
 
delb0y said:
But someone, maybe the Post Office overall, has pocketed all the extra cash. If nothing else, bonuses were no doubt paid on the marvellous profits.
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Well, yes.

System shows a loss that isn't there
PO bullies staff into paying back these 'losses'. Where did they go?
 
ancient_mariner said:
It's entirely possible that the software created 'reasons' for the money to be missing...
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delb0y said:
But someone, maybe the Post Office overall, has pocketed all the extra cash. If nothing else, bonuses were no doubt paid on the marvellous profits.
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I think that's multiplying entities unnecessarily.

The simplest possibility is that there was no read following the write of each transaction, so no check that the row had been written correctly - the classic beginner's mistake when designing and coding any financial system. Another possibility is that the terminals are intelligent, so the transactions get batched and posted to the mainframe. Again, there needs to be a check to see that the complete batch was stored on the mainframe and matches that on the terminal. There's lots of ways to screw up a transaction, when the data isn't local (and more than enough, even when it's local).
 
ancient_mariner said:
It's entirely possible that the software created 'reasons' for the money to be missing in the form of apparent sales and financial activity that never actually happened. In such a case the money really would appear to be missing from an accounting POV. It may also be that someone had found a way to exfiltrate large amounts of money from the system using virtual transactions, but that's not a possibility I'm seeing mentioned at the moment. The thing is that if Fujitsu staff could access individual accounts, so could anyone else who could operate the system at that level, so the thefts taking place were genuine but not by the accused.

However AFAIK it WAS a software fault.
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I recall one Post Mistress..do we call them that these days ?..Anyway, she related how,one day, she phoned the IT dept for help and whilst the IT person was on the phone to her she made a transaction and the figure increased ..doubled,I think.. infront of her eyes".She said that IT person said they'd look into it.
 
And in this evening's news.......

The PO have an unpaid tax bill running into many millions!

Was that a mistake based on Horizon system data accounting errors :thinking:
 
Garry Edwards said:
I don't think that it was that simple.

Correct, but it goes much further. The majority pleaded guilty to false accounting, because they had been threatened with theft charges, even though there was zero actual evidence of theft, and pleading guilty to false accounting wouldn't necessarily lead to imprisonment.

There are several organisations, including the Post Office, which are a prosecuting authority, The CPS has its faults, but they do at least check that there is a strong prosecution case before approving charges, but with the Post Office as the prosecuting authority this backstop doesn't exist, so totally false charges can be brought.
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The Post Office has its own fraud squad, who are paid a bonus for obtaining a confession from the person under suspect. This will be obtained via a Police stye interview, complete with recording apparatus, the confession will then be used in a court of law to obtain a prosecution.

These individuals involved are in fact Subpostmasters/mistresses, a Sub Post Office is a franchise, rather than being directly employed by the PO. Which is why the Post Office union has not been interested in defending them.

Furthermore, when I worked for the Post Office, you didn't have any accounting software, virtually everything was done manually, including the arithmetic. Pensions and other benefits were paid in cash, you either had a docket from the pension book, or a Girocheque as physical proof of monies paid to third parties, for example, so the reasons for your account not balacing could be investigated before submitting it, rather than the software telling you that your account has not balanced.

But the real scandal is not the faulty software, but the Post Office's refusal to accept that there was a problem, preferring to prosecute innocent people for fraud, and as the Post Office is owned by the Government, it too should be held to be responsible for this state of affairs as well
 
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The more one digs into this, the more it incriminates the leadership of both Labour and the Tories.

It seems clear that Blair knew about the mess in 1998, if not earlier...

www.bbc.co.uk

Tony Blair was warned Horizon IT system could be flawed, documents show

The then-PM was told IT system now at the centre of the Post Office scandal was "possibly unreliable".
www.bbc.co.uk

Horizon's original purpose, as a counter service for welfare payments, was dropped as a total failure. It only became an accounting system when, casting around for a way to save face, the system's secondary accounting function was sold as its raison d'etre, in an attempt to save face. A major reason for this extraordinary piece of lunacy seems to be a little light blackmail by Fujitsu, taking the form of a thinly veiled threat to close down a semiconductor plant in Tony Blair's constituency, if Horizon was chucked out.

One obvious reason for the current sudden panic by Sunak and Co. is the evidence that every government, since John Major's, was well aware that the whole thing was a disaster and was kept alive by massive corruption. The only clear winner in this whole mess is Fujitsu, which seems to have many questions to answer but on the current evidence will not be asked them. :headbang:
 
This just turned up on my news feed:-
The man who was in charge of the Post Office nationally during the time of the wrongful prosecutions scandal has spoken exclusively to the MK Citizen from his home in Milton Keynes.
Alan Cook CBE is now retired and lives quietly in a large detached house in the city while serving as a governor of Milton Keynes College.

Source
 
Cobra said:
This just turned up on my news feed:-
The man who was in charge of the Post Office nationally during the time of the wrongful prosecutions scandal has spoken exclusively to the MK Citizen from his home in Milton Keynes.
Alan Cook CBE is now retired and lives quietly in a large detached house in the city while serving as a governor of Milton Keynes College.

Source
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I wonder if he will be called to give evidence to the inquiry.....................and potentially one to be sanctioned in due course following the Police investigation???

Just found the article

My quick read of it..................sadly no sense of an enquiring mind. I will not copy & paste any quotes but for someone in high position it sounds like he was a mushroom....and gives no confidence in the management structure of the PO during that time being a cohesive whole rather more like compartmentalised and fractured are words that come to mind. :( :mad: :headbang:
 
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The thing is, post office sub-postmasters aren't accountants and double-entry financial accounting is a black art. It would be easy enough for an accountant in the PO to have created an additional suspense account in the general ledger to cater for all the unaccounted-for windfalls from sub post offices, to make the PO books balance. Auditors ought to be able to identify and question it, but some BS from the CFO would probably shut them up. So the PO auditors may well be in the frame for incompetence too, but for not challenging some dodgy mystery holding accounts.

Many years ago I worked for a company, replacing arcane spaghetti coded financial files with Oracle ERP software. When we pulled all the data over to the new software and rationalised the results in our testing, we found £40m disparity. That huge amount of money was forecast revenue that had been accumulated over many years and never matched to actual revenue, leaving a similarly sized hole in the stated accounts in the FY that we completed the project. The company was forced into a reluctant takeover as a result. This smells similar.
 
Cobra said:
And that is exactly why I linked the source, so you didn't have to go searching :p
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OK....though your link was for the MK 'front page' and the story was one of the many in the scrolled down content ;)

Oooops! I was referring the MK link in your text......................and just spotted the 'source' text tucked under the text area.... :exit:
 
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Box Brownie said:
OK....though your link was for the MK 'front page' and the story was one of the many in the scrolled down content ;)
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Not when I click it it's not, it goes straight to the story :thinking:
 
AndrewFlannigan said:
You may have missed my point...

Most of the accused had done nothing wrong, so there had to be "too much" money sloshing around in the integrated accounts and someone in the auditors ought to have wondered whence the excess had come. In such a case, why were the accounts signed off?

Of course, you may just have been deploying sarcasm... :thinking:
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Is there a possibility that Fujitsu emplyees were creaming off the excess then covering their own tracks? The current PO CEO claims that they have tried to find where the money went three times, but blames "poor quality data" for not locating it.
 
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