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Edward Davey MP
Norman Lamb MP. Our ref: 229488
House of Commons Your ref
London
SW1A OAA
January 2011
Thank you for your letter of 15 December to Vince Cable enclosing
tituent, Allison Henderson!
i /, setting out her concerns about post office
audit procedures and accusations levelled against subpostmasters. I am
replying as Minister for Postal Affairs.
The issues raised in your letter are, however, operational and contractual matters
between Post Office Ltd (POL) and Mrs Henderson and I should make clear that
neither I nor the Department can intervene in cases which are sub judice or
where court action had been determined. I understand that Mrs Henderson
was charged to appear at Norwich Crown Court on 15 December 2010. I
further understand that she pleaded guilty to false accounting (POL having
dropped a charge of theft) and the Court imposed a sentence of a Community
Penalty Order with unpaid work of 200 hours and £1,500 costs. Mrs
Henderson also repaid the shortage and, I understand, at no time during the
case were any problems with POL’s Horizon IT system raised by Mrs
Henderson, or separately identified.
The Horizon computerized accounting system operates in all post office
branches and has done so for over 10 years, processing up to 750
transactions a second across the country at peak times. The system and the
processes around it offer a very high level of security and resilience and are
designed to ensure that should part of the system or equipment fail that the
integrity of the accounting records is always maintained. The system has
proved to be very robust since its introduction.
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The Horizon system was fully tested at the time of the nationwide
implementation and all new software releases are also subject to rigorous
testing prior to going live in order to assure the accuracy of the accounting
processes. For example, the testing for the latest upgrade to the system
introduced over the past year was independently assured by Wipro as being
‘best practice’ (Wipro is amongst the largest global IT services companies in
the world and recognised experts for Product Engineering and Testing).
As regards ongoing performance, the Horizon information security
management systems are accredited to industry standards and there are
extensive controls to ensure data validation and reconciliation. A transaction
log is available for every branch and full audit logs of all system and user
activity and transactions are securely sealed, backed up and retained to
provide an evidential and investigative repository.
The system is based on the principles of ‘double entry book keeping.’ If an
accounting issue is identified at a particular branch (which may have been
caused by, for example, incorrect keying of a transaction by the
subpostmaster), there are full processes in place between Post Office Ltd’s
central accounting team and the individual subpostmaster to investigate and
resolve such issues and identify the responsibility. It is important to note that
these are the kinds of issues that can occur in all businesses (incorrect data
entries by branch staff, incorrect amounts of cash taken etc). These are user
issues and are not examples of the Horizon system itself creating errors.
All subpostmasters and branch managers are able to utilize the reporting
functions within Horizon and to perform counts of their cash and stock in order
to confirm their accounting position on a timely basis.
Finally, POL has advised that they would be happy to consider re-opening a
branch in Worstead. Upon Mrs Henderson’s initial suspension last February, a
temporary subpostmaster was appointed to run the branch from the existing
premises but after less than a week Mrs Henderson gave the temporary
subpostmaster notice to quit and the branch had to close.
If there are interested parties who have premises available, then POL would
be happy to discuss with them an outreach option which is the model that is
considered to be most sustainable in this area, given that the previous
Worstead post office was serving only around 90 customers a week at the
time.of.closure...Any interested parties should contact Wendy Hamilton at POL
on
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EDWARD DAVEY