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Witness Name: Anne Mannifield
Statement No: WITNO7290100
Dated: 10th January 2023
POST OFFICE HORIZON IT INQUIRY
FIRST STATEMENT OF ANNE MANNIFIELD
I, Anne Mannifield, will say as follows;
INTRODUCTION
I am a former employee of Post Office Limited and held various roles between
December 1988 to June 2002.
This witness statement is made to assist the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry (the
‘Inquiry’) with the matters set out in Rule 9 Request dated 3 January 2023 (the
‘Request’)
BACKGROUND
1. I worked for the Post Office from December 1988 until June 2002, when I took
redundancy. Until May 1999, I worked in mainly at New Street, Huddersfield.
During that time, my roles included: counter clerk, supervisor, cover manager.
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After this and until I took redundancy, I moved to the Helpline where my roles
included: postmaster helpline telephone operative, database updater for DWP.
and foreign exchange. I cannot remember overseeing any suspense account.
. As a counter clerk, I received the basic in-branch training for the Horizon
system, which was similar (in my memory) to the previous Echo system. On
moving to the Helpline, I had a couple of days training on how to log the
incidents on the IT system, but considering my experience and training on the
Horizon system, I was able to give assistance to postmasters that had mis-
balanced.
. My responsibility in helping Subpostmasters, was to talk through the balancing
process and reminding them to check that they had ‘remmed’ out cheques,
cash etc. Sometimes this did the trick, sometimes the discrepancies did not
come to light. I am not able to recall how often this would happen. I remember
one time, when one postmaster had mis-balanced by more than £5000 and
after all the checks, the discrepancy was not found. I remember ringing the
postmaster the following day to check. I suggested that they compared their
pension docket, debit and credit totals with a different week to see if they were
similar. The reason I did this, is because the amount in question could not have
been handed to a customer in error. It was a vast amount of money that should
have been resolved. I do not know the outcome of this. We had team leaders
to whom we could refer if needed. I can only speak for myself but I considered
it was my job to give help to postmasters in any way I could and I feel that I did
give adequate support. Having worked on the counter, I knew how challenging
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it could be when things went wrong. I was not aware of any bugs, errors or
defects but must have suspected problems when asking the postmasters to
check previous week's values.
4. This witness statement is written in my own words and contains only slightly
vague recollections from 20+ years ago.
Statement of Truth
I believe the content of this statement to be true.
January 2023