Dear Post Office Limited,

There is no doubt a release of Horizon due to go live sometime in the next few months.

Given the comments from Justice Fraser on Monday I wonder if you could provide me with a list of errors in Horizon that are due to be remedied in this next release and the notes held against these errors in the Known Errors Log?

It would also be nice if you could indicate whether or not the subpostmaster network has or has not been notified of these errors that remain in the system until the new release goes live.

Yours faithfully,

Tim McCormack

Dear Post Office Ltd

Thank you for your reply. However I have a few problems with it and upon explanation I think you will see y point.

Consider the circumstances: a subpostmaster is sitting in his office late at night trying to work out where on earth a large discrepancy in his accounts has come from. He can't find it and he knows if he contacts the help desk he will ultimately be forced to pay the amount of the discrepancy to POL. He can't afford to pay it. It would mean bankruptcy and he would lose everything. So he does the only thing he can to hide it from POL and alters his stock declaration knowing it to be false. That will give him time to try and find the answer and/or raise the funds necessary to cover the loss. He knows it cannot be down to an error in Horizon because he trusts POL to have told him about any error that might exist in the system that he should look out for. In fact in a trial of a subpostmistress that he is aware of POL themselves said as they were prosecuting the SPMR for theft and who ultimately was sent to prison, any error in Horizon would be OBVIOUS to the SPMR so again, taking POL's word, it couldn't possibly be an error in Horizon.

But as we now know, errors do occur in Horizon and as a result of your reply above you indicate that you will only tell SPMRs about these errors many months after they have been identified and are being fixed in a new release of the software. This is a new approach by POL and I welcome it as a minor step forward but in at least one respect it is a step backward. The SPMR above, sitting on a huge unexplained loss, would surely be entitled therefore to suspend payment to POL of the loss for an indeterminate period while errors in the system come to light that could have been responsible for it. In other words he waits for the release notes you describe above and then he goes and checks to see if any of the errors made known to the network are responsible for the loss he incurred.

We know what the answer to the above conundrum is and until such time as POL implement the solution all SPMRs have every right to declare any unexplained loss as probably being the result of a Horizon error. An unknown error, because as you know, all known errors were once unknown. It need not be necessary to remind POL at this stage that forcing subposmasters to repay any shortfalls in their branch accounts that neither POL nor the SPMR can identiify or explain is illegal as the default now is the existence of an unknown error in Horizon causing the shortfall.

Yours sincerely,

Tim McCormack