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Message _ _ seinen
From: NEIL BISHOP { '
on behalf of NEIL BISHOP : wt
Sent: 11/09/2013 15:15:30 .
To: Sharon Merryweather I H
ce: i ; Dawn Penty
Subject: ‘eview of Horizon
Attachments: SDO00_KMC4513090515071.pdf; SDO00_KMC4513090515070.pdf
Dear Sharon,
You suggested that I send you the evidence next time we had a problem
with getting Horizon to balance and unfortunately it wasn't too long
before this happened. On Saturday we had a new member of staff - who only
began work in August - working alongside an experienced staff member.
Saturday is usually a quiet day but this was busier than most.
At the start of the day we were running a loss for the trading period of
about £77.95, which was itself cause for concern but we usually find that
discrepancies of this size often rectify themselves when the coin stocks
are checked. However, by the end of the session the loss had increased to
about £1,083.55 and every effort to track the cause of the problem has
been unsuccessful.
I have attached the APS list and you will see that we have highlighted a
number of large transactions that were potential cuplrits. I have also
attached the transaction log for every transaction over £800. However,
some detection work has confirmed that the payment made by Santander cash
deposit swipe card was correctly entered on Horizon.
In addition, I checked the transactions between £400 and £800 but there
was only one, a CA Cash Withdrawal for £400.
I have printed the remittances in and out (nil that day), the transaction
correction report (not attached but also nil), and the transfer
reconciliation report (not attached but also nil).
We can't see any obvious errors. Short of the staff taking £1,000 out of
the till and splitting it between them - which we consider most unlikely -
we cannot explain where the money has gone. Can you see or suggest
anything that we might have missed?
The stock response from the helpline in these circumstances is that
everything will come good when we balance at the end of the next TP but
invariably we find that is not the case.
For many weeks until last Friday our books have balanced to within a few
pounds.
Best wishes,
Neil
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Neil Bishop D F Enterprise, Darnall Forum Trading & Darnall Post Office,
AQ...
_} (Post Office)
Web: www. dfenterprise.org.uk,
www.darnall.org.uk & http://darnallforum.blogspot.com
D F Enterprise is the trading name of Darnall Forum
Company No. 03644311
Charity No 1121396
Main Office)
Darnall Post Office is the trading name of Darnall Forum Trading, a wholly owned subsidiary of
Darnall Forum
Company No 07228875
Sent: Monday, 15 July 2013, 1
Subject: FW: Re External Review of Horizon
Good afternoon Neil and thank you for your email.
Having studied the interim report, the NFSP report that the findings are suggesting that the system is fundamentally
robust, however there have been a few glitches that have subsequently been corrected and the necessary adjustments
made. The report is also suggesting that, as the NFSP have told POL for many years, the training and back up for
Horizon is somewhat lacking.
you should send the details either by email
to paula. venneli in please) or by post to Paula Vennells, Post
Office Limited, 148 Old Street, Céiidon, Eciv 9HQ.
I hope this helps.
Regards
Sharon
XXX
Sharon Merryweather
PA to General Secretary
National Federation of Subpostmasters
Evelyn House
22 Windlesham Gardens
Shoreham by Sea
West Sussex
BN43 5AZ
Telephone:
Fax:
Website:
Sent: 11 July 2013 16:07
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To: Amanda Cox
Subject: Re External Review of Horizon
Dear Amanda,
I would welcome your thoughts on the following. Further to our previous correspondence, (please see
below), we continue to have occasional unexplained shortfalls so we noted with considerable concern
news reports that more than one hundred sub-post offices are now reporting unexplained
discrepancies in their Horizon balances and that Post Office Ltd has conceded that it is theoretically
possible for Horizon to arrive at an incorrect balance.
The interim report seems to imply that there could be a 'small system problem’ with the hardware
linked to a branch, although it finds that it is more likely that mistakes happen because the system is
over complicated and because staff are not following best practice when using the system and need
more training to minimise the risks of not balancing correctly.
In our case, I don't think any of us feel confident in tracing a problem once it occurs. Sometimes we
can find mistakes quickly but more often we cannot find anything wrong at all and the shortfall, or less
frequently the surplus, comes as a complete surprise when we press the ‘rollover’ tab on the screen
at the end of the TP. That is to say, cash and stock have appeared to balance correctly up until that
point, so that it becomes a ‘fingers crossed’ moment each month.
We have also noticed that once a fairly obvious mistake has been made, this can then mask another
more serious underlying problem which is only uncovered when the original mistake has been
rectified at the end of the week. Given the volume of transactions, by that time it is often too late to
trace what went wrong or even, sometimes, which day it went wrong.
For example, I once incorrectly remmed in 500 books of second class stamps as 500 individual
second class stamps, a mistake which also got past the person who checked my entry on the system.
Of course such an obvious mistake was easy to pick up at the weekly balance, but we then
discovered that this obvious error had masked something else which - after several days - we simply
could not trace.
When we were last audited even the auditors missed a similar error. One stock item had been
misrecorded on Horizon, even though the stock had been counted correctly by the stock checker at
the time, so that the system appeared to the auditors to balance when really there was a £100
discrepancy which I picked up the following week. We have since improved our stock checking
prcedures to make sure this kind of silly mistake doesn't happen but I am left thinking that there may
be other similar procedural improvements that we could make to rule out other mistakes.
Repeated losses - even if they are not catastrophic like the ones experienced by some of the people
in the news - demoralise staff and discourage them from selling products vigorously because one
shortfall in a month can wipe out all of their hard work.
We are converting to a main branch in a few months time and perhaps that would be a good
opportunity - when we are closed - to make sure that all of the staff are upskilled in best practice to
avoid mistakes, and in using the Horizon system to detect issues when they occur. However, I would
not rule out a small system fault of the type which the report identifies - too small to appear on the
POL radar but large enough to impact on us, because we can go for months without a problem and
then have a run of 'bad luck’.
Best wishes,
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Neil
Neil Bishop D F Enterprise, Darnall Forum Trading & Darnall Post Office, 245 Main Road Darnall
Sheffi -
~_ (Post Office)
www.dfenterprise.org.uk, www.darnall.org.uk &
http://darnallforum.blogspot.com
D F Enterprise is the trading name of Darnall Forum
Company No. 03644311
Charity No 1121396
Darnall Post Office is the trading name of Darnall Forum Trading, a wholly owned subsidiary of
Darnall Forum
Company No 07228875
From: NEIL BISH¢
To: Amanda Cox 4
Sent: Monday, 2 July 2012, 16:00
Subject: Re: Re External Review of Horizon
No worries. I am pleased to hear that you don't get lots of complaints about Horizon, but clearly we
willhave to look again at our own systems as we have had three unexplained shortfalls in the last
seven months.
Neil Bishop D F Enterprise, Darnall Forum Trading & Darnall Post Office, 245 Main Road Darnall
Sheffield S9 4QD,
T GRO
(Post Office)
E GRO L ‘Web: www.dfenterprise.org.uk, www.darnall.org.uk &
http://darnallforum.blogspot.com
D F Enterprise is the trading name of Darnall Forum
Company No. 03644311
Charity No 1121396
Darnall Post Office is the trading name of Darnall Forum Trading, a wholly owned subsidiary of
Darnall Forum
Company No 07228875
Sent: Monday, 2 July 2012, 13:03
Subject: FW: Re External Review of Horizon
I do apologise Neil, I put the incorrect name on the email.
Kind regards
Amanda
Amanda Cox
NFSP, Evelyn House
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22 Windlesham Gardens
Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex
BN43 5AZ
web: www.nfsp.org.uk
This email and any attachments are confidential and intended for the addressee only. If you are not the named recipient,
you must not use, disclose, reproduce, copy or distribute the contents of this communication. If you have received this in
error, please contact the sender and then delete this email from your system
From: Amanda Cox
Sent: 02 July 2012 13:01
To: Amanda Cox
Cc: George Thomson
Subject: RE: Re External Review of Horizon
SENT ON BEHALF OF GEORGE THOMSON
Dear Neil
Thank you for your recent enquiry regarding the Horizon computer system.
Over 70 million transactions are carried out each and every week at Post Offices all over the UK and I
can assure you that we have only a handful of people who claim that the system is systemically
faulty. If the Horizon system was systemically faulty we would have tens of thousands of complaints
each and every year. The NFSP continues to believe that the Horizon Computer system is accurate,
robust and fit for purpose and we believe that the external review of Horizon will come to the same
conclusion.
Yours sincerely
George Thomson
Amanda Cox
NFSP, Evelyn House
22 Windlesham Gardens
Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex
BN43 5AZ
This email and any attachments are confidential and intended for the addressee only. If you are not the named recipient,
you must not use, disclose, reproduce, copy or distribute the contents of this communication. If you have received this in
error, please contact the sender and then delete this email from your system
From: NEIL BISHOP [mailto;
Sent: 25 June 2012 15:58 *~
To: Amanda Cox
Cc: SylviaHamilton; ElizabethBarton; NeilParry; JackCzauderna; GillianJackson
Subject: Re External Review of Horizon
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We note that the Post Office has commissioned a review of the Horizon system in a small number of
cases where serious misaccounting was alleged and the former subpostmaster disputes this. We
wondered if the NFSP is taking a view on this as we also have concerns about Horizon and wondered
how widespread these misgivings are.
Although we won an award this year for Best Agency Branch in the small branch category at the
national network sales awards, we have been blighted by a series of three unexplained losses in
December, January and April. These occurred at the end of our Trading Periods and - in total - have
added up to £1,376 since 1 January this year. They are not related to cash handling or to stock
management. The branch was audited last year and was found to be in good order. They tend to be
the kind of issue which appears only when you get to the point of rolling over the account, when a
message appears saying that losses need to be made good in order to complete the roll over and
these then appear as an unexplained item in our branch accounts for the trading period.
Because the branch reopened under new management on 31 August 2010 we put our early losses
down to our own inexperience and, at first, such losses as did occur were clearly due to staff errors -
e.g. using the wrong exchange rate when purchasing foreign currency from the customer or, on one
occasion, remming the cheques out twice! However, we cannot find any good explanation for the
losses that have happened this year and our staff are now becoming vastly more experienced in
carrying out transactions and using the Horizon system. When they make mistakes they are usually
able to spot them almost immediately and get them resolved. We have asked the NBSC helpline and
the regional agency support team for advice but we have had no satisfactory comeback.
We are wondering whether other subpost offices have reported similar experiences and whether,
therefore, Post Office Ltd are being asked to broaden the scope of their investigation. Our post office
is owned by a charitable company and, as you can imagine, the trustees are getting quite concerned.
There was even a suggestion that staff might be guilty of malpractice, although there is no evidence
that this is the case. When they saw the news reports about the external review the trustees asked us
to enquire about its scope and whether it might address the sort of issue we have experienced.
Best wishes,
Neil Bishop
D F Enterprise, Darnall Forum Trading & Darnall Post Office, 245 Main Road Darnall Sheffield S9
4QD.
(Post Office)
Web: www.dfenterprise.org.uk, www.darnall.org.uk &
D F Enterprise is the trading name of Darnall Forum
Company No. 03644311
Charity No 1121396
Darnall Post Office is the trading name of Darnall Forum Trading, a wholly owned subsidiary of
Darnall Forum
Company No 07228875
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