Majority of Subpostmasters still getting unexplained Horizon discrepancies

A majority of serving Subpostmasters have told the public inquiry into the Post Office scandal that they are still getting unexplained discrepancies generated by the Post Office’s Horizon IT system.

Over the last twelve months, 57% of Subpostmasters told a wide-ranging independent survey that they have recorded unexplained discrepancies in their accounts. A whopping 92% have also experienced glitches, including screen freezes (70%) or loss of connection (68%). Two thirds of respondents say these problems occur on a monthly basis, or more frequently.

Many of the unexplained discrepancies relate to unexplained, missing or double-entry transactions. Evidence from the Horizon IT system was used to falsely prosecute Subpostmasters between 2000 and 2015. The system (and the way its figures were interpreted) were the cause of the Post Office scandal. The Post Office has stopped prosecuting people, but it seems the glitches and discrepancies haven’t gone away.

The survey, commissioned by the Inquiry and sworn into evidence at the Inquiry today, also reveals that 72% of serving Subpostmasters feel undervalued by the Post Office and think the Post Office board doesn’t listen them (60%) or understand their concerns (74%).

More than half of serving Subpostmasters feel they are operating under unfair contracts with a third of respondents calling the contract “very unfair”. Only two-thirds of Subpostmasters remember receiving a contract before (or after) they started working as Subpostmasters and only 15% say they have been sent a comprehensive document detailing their role and responsibilities since the Bates v Post Office Common Issues judgment was handed down in March 2019.

The survey has been uploaded to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry website. I contacted the Post Office for comment. They gave me this statement:

“We are focused on supporting the Inquiry to reach its independent conclusions. Hearing directly from former and current postmasters is an important part of this work. We are determined to learn lessons from the past and improve the organisation for our postmasters and the 10 million customers who rely on us each week. The ongoing Public Inquiry is an important way for us to achieve these aims and we will not be commenting outside of the Inquiry at this time.”  

Compensation disaster pt 734294316

A survey was also sent to applicants to the largest redress scheme, initially known as the Historical Shortfall Scheme, now known as the Horizon Shortfall Scheme (HSS). This is for people who were outside the Bates v Post Office group litigation who had not been prosecuted. It covered those who had been suspended or sacked over discrepancies in their accounts, or forced to hand over money whilst still serving in order to keep their jobs.

A third of applicants to the HSS were “very dissatisfied” with the scheme with 78% saying they had not been contacted by an HSS case assessor. Of those who were contacted, nearly half were “dissatisfied” with how well-informed they were kept throughout the application process. Of those who received offers of financial redress 59% reported “high dissatisfaction” with the amount, with 49% reporting dissatisfaction with the “amount of information provided about how the outcome was determined”.

The law firm Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) are assisting with the administration of the HSS (though they do not decide on the amount of compensation offered or paid to individual sub-postmasters). The fees they have been generating from this wheeze are costing the taxpayer a small fortune. I have contacted them for comment.

You can watch the author of the survey report – Gavin Ellison from YouGov – giving evidence at the Inquiry here.


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21 responses to “Majority of Subpostmasters still getting unexplained Horizon discrepancies”

  1. I am a retired chartered accountant who was advised by a very experienced former SPM client (now deceased) that computer problems pre-dated Horizon but there was nothing SPMs could do about it. Post Office management was aggressive and incompetent and their representatives in the Federation every bit as bad.

    The practice of SPMs making inaccurate balance declarations was reported to me to be a consequence which, when discovered, resulted in extortion, prosecutions and sometimes imprisonment. SPM’s should have been able to turn to their MPs for help but I know, from personal experience, that MPs who take a genuine interest in real concerns are almost as rare as hen’s teeth.

    Jo Hamilton’s assertion that nothing has changed rings very true, though I fear that, in many instances, they will get worse.

    1. The Horizon debacle has not been dealt with. It is a continuing saga. The program was bad from the beginning. PO jumped at the chance of paying nothing toward its development, meaning Fujitsu owns all the code. Once PO was committed to using it in branches, it was entirely dependent on Fujitsu to solve any problems. So Fujitsu had no incentive to do a proper job writing code for nothing in the first place, and even less incentive to try to debug code it knows should never have been released.

      In my view the government should insist upon having the Horizon program independently evaluated by software experts to determine once and for all if it is fit for purpose and what detrimental effects remote access may have.
      At least the cost of Horizon faults is now born by the company, I read, to the tune of £1M monthly. For that you could have an army of experts dissect every routine. But I suspect Horizon has been written off as a bad product that cannot be saved, and PMs will have to endure it until a replacement is found. It is interesting that Horizon shortfalls are just numbers generated by a faulty system and not real money whose source can be determined through a proper audit trail. And yet these sudden, unrelated deficits are still treated as actual losses that accumulate alarmingly?

      I agree that nothing has changed. The problems are being papered over and some of the burden passed from the PMs to the taxpayer. Without proper oversight and PO management that sees further than its next bonus / pay hike, the future looks bleak.

  2. no surprise

  3. As the money moved across POL counters would be transactions between parties eg gov pension paid to an individual, or an individual’s payment of a utility bill, we would have heard about incomplete payments from some of the parties to these transactions. As far as I’m aware, this hasn’t happened – it has just been the Horizon system reporting a discrepancy. So it seems no money has actually been lost or gained but the system is telling the SPM there is a shortfall to be made up. Is this how computer glitches happen? I would have thought there would be some consistency in the errors if coding in the software was faulty – I really don’t know, I’m not an expert.

    1. Apparent inconsistencies in errors thrown up by software is one of the things you have to drill down underneath to find out what the error(s) are. To (reliably) fix a bug – rather than “hack” around it, which we’ve all done to keep a system running – you first have to reproduce it, and reproduce it reliably. This means giving the system the exact set of inputs and run it in the exact environment that leads to the error. And there will be many thousands of variables in any complex system. Horizon 1 was a highly distributed system – this means lots of unreliable communications links between components, and properly designed and implemented error detection and recovery is critical to the reliable operation of such systems. The software chosen by Fujitsu for that purpose was far from that, and the team developing the ePOS system using it were incompetent.

      So, here we are.

  4. Are the errors that are still happening mostly showing losses rather than excesses? By the law of averages, that would suggest someone is controlling the ‘glitches’.

    1. Right?! That’s what I don’t understand. Random glitches should have given us overages too! What am I missing?

  5. I can explain all the Horizon discrepancies. The Horizon software produced by Fujitsu had and still has countless bugs, errors and defects.

    This explains all the discrepancies.

    1. I was a subpostmaster. But I am no longer in the UK and the issue gets very little coverage here. I have a lot of questions but I’ll just ask the one that I always ask but never get an answer to.If these are all random glitches , why did bugs never generate an overage for us?

      1. Having watched a lot of the evidence sessions, this is an issue which puzzles me. Why are there SPMs who, for years, experienced no issues with Horizon? If the bugs were in the code, why weren’t all SPMs affected?

        1. Bryan Hewson in Amble avatar
          Bryan Hewson in Amble

          I am a serving SPM with over 24 years service ( Horizon came into my branch after approx 9 months working the old paper based system of record keeping ).
          There were & are ( still ) overages.
          I signed the SPM Contract before taking up service.
          I’d taken legal advice.
          The gist of which was:
          “If ANYTHING goes wrong it will ALWAYS be your ( financial ) responsibility”
          I knew & know my wife & I are honest people.
          Every week & then every month ( under Horizon system) there is ALWAYS unders & overs.
          My approach was one would balance the other out.
          And they did, though overall I sensed it seemed my occasional cheques to POL suggested I was contributing to their revenues as investigating every error was both impractical & technically impossible ( believe me I tried but worked 54 hours at the counter restricted my motivation to spend hours every night chasing not every reported -by POL – errors both ups & downs.
          In October 2010 on Friday 20th a shortfall of £4,890 was apparent after counting the cash ( daily occurrence).
          Count again.
          Count again.
          Go in early next day & count again with fresh eyes.
          Still missing.
          I sent the cheque in.
          I knew my Contractual responsibilities.
          Post GLO Trial the Historical Shortfall scheme was established.
          During the Inquiry evidence came out of a major software update into the whole network 24 hours before my £4890 “loss”.
          I fell off my chair.
          I submitted a claim for £4,890 under the HSS.
          Five weeks later I received the £4,890 PLUS interest ( unexpectedly ) of around £1,800.
          That was around 15 months ago.
          I still experience overages & shortfalls every month.
          I have & will NEVER send another cheque to POL.
          Over months they appear to balance out.
          Hope this explains some of the questions raised by non-SPMs
          Forward to the Inquiry.

          1. This issue sounds familiar. Back in the 90s I was developing a product and working with a software programmer located remotely. A part of the circuitry that had been working no longer worked when I later went back to check it. I could find no fault but the software did not seem to be controlling it as it should. The programmer insisted he had made no changes to that part of the code so It had to be my hardware. Some animated discussions ensued.
            Subsequently I had a phone call. He had made a code change that related to a completely different part of the circuit and the updated machine code program now had a corruption that was causing my problem.

            This shows that any small change (or big change) to software can have unforeseen consequences. Not only must the change be tested but the entire program, to make sure that works as before. I doubt Horizon software is adequately documented or the changes were properly tested. Badly written and documented software is very hard for someone else to debug.

            I’m very pleased your loss was repaid with interest and you no longer have to subsidise the Post Office.

        2. Essentially because there were so many moving parts in the overall system, you could get unique combinations of events that affected small numbers of branches whilst not causing a ripple at larger scale. And the service was not managed in such a way that patterns of problems could be spotted and acted upon. Those problems might not have just been balance discrepancies. When running big IT systems you have to bring different symptoms together to get a true picture of the service.

          In IT language Horizon was a “highly distributed” solution with numerous ways in which many bits of hardware interacted with many different pieces of software. It was not one big computer running one big programme.

          Think of it this way. It’s perfectly possible for hundreds of the same model of passenger jet to fly tens of thousands of people round the world daily, with no problems, yet the combination of a small undetected defect and not-quite-perfect pilot actions can cause a disaster.

  6. I have no knowledge of the Horizon system but am at a loss to understand why

    a) Fujitsu apparently have a system where Postmasters data can be added to, updated, deleted remotely by Fujitsu employees without there being any audit trail of such changes. Even support fixes, necessary or not, should have an audit trail that can be downloaded. Why haven’t auditors picked this up?

    b) Why is it claimed to be so difficult to download a copy of all transactions on specified days. This should be really easy?

    c) How could a prosecution take place without the above evidence being produced beforehand for the court?

    d) How were the Post Office accountants and auditors able to sign off the accounts

  7. Wow……..
    not suprised and as mentioned earlier Nick Read was again part of the problem..

    knobbled by the perm secs…

    1. And disappointingly it also appeared in that readout by Hollinrake.

  8. POL aka the taxpayer are just writing the looses off.Nothing in writing the SPM gets a phone call that says as a “goodwill geswture2 the loss will not be pursued

  9. Something isn’t adding up, which is why I am positive that this was a highly sophisticated organised corporate crime carried out by upper management and protected by crooked lawyers without whom corporate crime would not be possible. The fact that each and every SPM was individually told, “You are the only one having problems with Horizon,” should raise dozens of red flags. Trust me, I know exactly how corporate crime aided by crooked lawyers works.

    1. perfectly commented on…..it has to be…

    2. If you saw the executives testifying, you wouldn’t have much confidence in their ability to orchestrate a large scale theft.

      1. What struck me this week when an email exchange between Nick Read at the Post Office and ?Patterson at Fujitsu was being commented on, was that if there are any dishonest sub postmasters out there (and every single company/community etc etc has one or two bad apples) then THIS is the time for them to make some money. Fujitsu refuses to support ANY Post Office accusations against sub postmasters because it is universally accepted that there are sometimes glitches in the system…..and the police won’t pursue Post Office accusations without clear and positive evidence. The Post Office has brought this situation on itself by the appalling way it has behaved over the past 20 years (and by all accounts it is still behaving appallingly). Nobody is going to believe the Post Office until they dramatically change their general attitude. I sat in the inquiry on Monday and was directly behind Nick Read during the afternoon. I couldn’t believe how unconcerned he appeared when Saf Ismail was giving very damning evidence very coherently.

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