I'm sure there have always been dishonest subpostmasters but this was an epidemic.
If anybody had looked at Harold Shipman's statistics he would have been caught years earlier. He was the common factor.
The common factors here were Horizon, the cover up, and the incompetent adjustments made by superusers sometimes with the users' credentials! There was no precedent for the amount of theft supposedly going on.
The PO knew there had been a big increase in the number and size of apparent defalcations. Instead of diligently following up on that in the knowledge that many SPMs with long service and good character were challenging the integrity of the Horizon system with similar experiences, the PO congratulated itself on identifying a level of theft that they assumed they had hitherto been unaware of.
Anybody who works in finance knows you have to investigate how a difference arises before it's assumed to be a cash error or theft and written off. At least to the point where you know the books are correct.
This is done by ticking off transactions and adding them up. This is called detailed auditing when it takes place in the absence of a known problem. EY as the PO auditors never did this, as is common with large companies they took the figures from the accounting system.
To what extent they identified the problems by sampling I don't know. I do know that the management letter following the 2011 audit did warn the PO of the lack of control over superusers and the wholly inadequate change control process of Fujitsu. It has been stated I think that there was never a system audit.
The PO had no more idea how the errors arose than the innocent SPMs did and theft was simply an assumption. There was no real evidence other than the assertion that Horizon was accurate and therefore the responsible human was the problem.
The evidence, incidentally, that Horizon was a good system was essentially that the debits and credits materially balanced at the global level - it was acknowledged that there were glitches but this 'balancing' was good enough for the PO and apparently its auditors. I do not know what the PO considered materiality to be. Did nobody ever go and tick off a few days work to see if the branch cash totals really were correct? Unbelievable.
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