Jan 26, 2024
Post Office plan to sack Horizon IT reviewer kept secret, documents reveal
Documents showing Post Office top bosses secretly decided in April 2014 to sack forensic accountants who had found bugs in their IT system have been obtained by the BBC. A Post Office board sub-committee, codenamed "Project Sparrow", took the decision with the full knowledge of the government. Post Office bosses kept insisting their systems were robust. The documents reveal the Post Office planned to pay a total of only £1m in "Token payments", or compensation, to sub-postmasters as it suppressed evidence of computer bugs in 2014. The Project Sparrow sub-committee was led by Post Office chair Alice Perkins and included chief executive Paula Vennells, alongside the Post Office's most senior internal lawyer, general counsel Chris Aujard, and Richard Callard, a senior civil servant at UK Government Investments, then a division of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. What the Post Office didn't say was that it also made an unwelcome finding, identifying incidents where defects or bugs in the Horizon software "gave rise to 76 branches being affected by incorrect balances or transactions which took some time to identify and correct".
Related companies
Make a complaint about Post Office by viewing their customer service contacts.
