24th October 2013
Mr M Grattage
Lake Post Office
Dear Mr Grattage
Re Cheque remittance error
I’m sorry to hear of the errors made at your branch in relation to your
cheque remittance of 6" July. I’m afraid the liability for the resultant
transaction correction (TC) does remain with your branch. Your actions
would have generated a balancing cash surplus to offset the impact of the
TC.
Your letter implies that you accept that your cheque remittance of the 6"
was duplicated. You also refer to your “error” on 10" July when the
negative cheque stock position was “corrected” through a cash/cheque
adjustment. As well as increasing cheque stock holdings a cash/cheque
adjustment will impact cash. This would have created an equal and
opposite cash gain.
The only way a branch could correct a duplicated remittance would be by
reversing the remittance. There is no evidence that this happened. The
supporting information has already been sent to you so I will focus on the
reasons why you dispute liability rather than the validity of issuing the
TC which looks as if clear cut.
1) I can see the point you make about Horizon allowing you to rem
out more cheques than is actually held. For a small branch such as
yours with one stock unit it feels as though a different type of
business rule could be appropriate. On the other hand there will
valid operational reasons to allow this scenario in the multi stock
unit branches of the network.
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Operational instructions should prevent branches from making
mistakes of this type through reprinting the cheque listing after
remming out and then cutting off the cheque listing. The Horizon
receipts should then be retained in case any error is not picked up
at the time.
A business rule is imposed at branch trading to ensure branches
cannot roll into the next trading period with a negative position in
any stock unit
At this point you were aware of an issue and resolved this by
adjusting rather than investigating the cause.
2) & 3) Icannot differentiate between the points you make here in
that the TC was issued too late for you to interrogate Horizon logs
to identify what other errors you made in TP3.
I agree that Finance Service Centre should endeavour to correct
branch errors as soon as possible. The TC was actually issued
within the agreed target date of 3months from notification of error
but the aim is for much earlier resolution than this. So I apologise
for the time taken to resolve your error. The Cheque team leader is
actively trying to free up additional resource to reduce issuing
times.
Nevertheless branches are responsible for errors made in their
branch and are by far the best placed to identify what has gone
wrong. Daily cash declarations and weekly balance period
rollovers will provide branches with realistic opportunities to
notice problems and identify what has gone wrong around the time
of error. TCs will rarely be issued in time for branches to check
back and spot transactional errors that will have faded from the
memory.
It is unfortunate that your errors in relation to the cheque remittance have
masked to some extent other errors made in the branch during the same
trading period. However I see no reason why Post Office Ltd should be
held liable for them.
I notice that at 5 of the 6 trading periods prior to TP3 you have recorded
discrepancies in excess of £250 which does suggest that even
investigations at the time of branch balance do not easily resolve error
made in branch. It is worrying to me that over this period you have made
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good a net gain of £1,222.98. It may be that the loss declared in TP3may
bear some relation to these gains which clearly should not be generated at
a Post Office branch.
So Iam sorry the TC was not issued as quickly as it should have been.
However there was adequate opportunity for the error to be identified and
resolved promptly within branch. This may have presented you with the
opportunity to identify and resolve other errors made.
Yours sincerely
Andy Winn
Relationship Manager
Finance Service Centre
1 Future Walk
Chesterfield
S49 1PF
Cc Branch Support team
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