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Witness Name: Rajinder Gihir
Statement No: WITN06220100
Dated: 15" February 2023
POST OFFICE HORIZON IT INQUIRY
FIRSTWITNESS STATEMENT OF RAJINDER GIHIR
I Rajinder Gihir will say as follows:
1. I retired from the Post Office 7 years ago. For the last 4 years before
I retired I was an auditor before that a trainer, so I never worked on
the counter for a considerable time and did not use Horizon on a
daily basis. My recollection might not be accurate.
2. I joined the Post Office in November 1990 as a counter clerk based at
Marlow. After approximately 10 years I became a trainer. After 7 years I
became an auditor until I retired in 2015. In the early days we were all
manual and there was no Horizon System. Horizon was introduced in
1995 circa. Original training was given by the Horizon team. For the
trainer role I was trained by the existing trainers including working on the
Horizon which was not very different from working on the counter. Extra
training in accounts was provided for becoming an auditor which relies
very little on the Horizon system. Apart from this I had no IT role.
3. The training of being a trainer was straight forward as basically it was
the same work. I received 2 weeks training from other trainers who
had been in the job for some time.
4. The training for new entrants consisted to two weeks training in a
classroom and then two weeks on site. A dummy stock was setup in the
class so we could take new people though the different screens for
carrying out transactions, stock & cash rem in and out, rectifying mistakes
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and balancing. A stock with a number was then setup and monopoly cash
was used with stamps that been cancelled. Every evening the cash was
then counted after doing various transactions, including transaction
reversals during the day. Every other day a balancing process was done
to check for shortages or excess in balancing. Time spent on balancing
was about 2 hours in the classroom and about the same on site. During
the day about 1 hour was spent on identifying discrepancies and their
causes.
5. Most of the feedback concentrated on being familiar with transactions and
balancing and the new entrants thought 2 weeks was not enough
especially big offices who dealt with car taxes and Passport applications.
The feedback was passed on to my manager.
6. I never encountered any bugs or errors or defects in the Horizon System
so the question of different approach never arose. I believe the training on
site was very inadequate and a minimum of 1 month should have been
given as many sub-postmasters did not come from IT related background.
Statement of Truth
I believe the content of this statement to be true.
Dated: I $Io>I Doers