"Eema, Tonight, trouble at one of our best-loved institutions." "This is a national scandal." "How the Post Office accused postmasters of stealing." "That there says there's no evidence of theft and yet they charged me with it." "We meet the postmasters who say they should never have gone to jail." "He said, "Take him down." I spent my 60th birthday in." "The whistle-blower who says the computer might have something to do with it." "There are a lot of errors, a lot of glitches coming through." "There were errors with the system?" "There are errors with the system." "Even the Post Office's own experts say something has gone wrong." "It's almost like institutional blindness." "Have there been miscarriages of justice?" "There's been a bit of a crime wave sweeping middle England." "But have no fear - the Post Office is on the case." "The Post Office says it's caught dozens of postmasters with their hands in the till." "People like Jo Hamilton." "She stole ?" "36,000 or" "Theinval said." "Now, no longer a postmistress, she cares for her elderly parents." "Career options are limited for convicted criminals." "Have you got a long history of committing crime?" "No, I hadn't even had a parking ticket up until then, so, you know, I don't have a criminal history." "Have you ever stolen anything in your entire life?" "No." "Shoplifter?" "No." "Customers in her village in Hampshire didn't believe" "Jo was a cinl nal either." "She is a good, hard working, honest woman and she is a woman of integrity." "Jo Hamilton is an honest shop keeper." "Not a very good business person." "Far too kind to people." "I think I can say she's one of the kindest people I know." "When she was taken to court, the village came too." "All of my family and 74 people from the village turned out." "And the judge, I don't think could quite believe what he was seeing in." "Fact, they filled up the public gallery, which was amazing." "Jo found herself in the dock, when an audit discovered a" "?" "36,000 short fall in her accounts." "The Post Office had charged Jo with theft and false accounting, but there was no direct evidence of theft." "The case against her relied upon the Post Office's computer system" " Horizon." "Introduced in 1999, it handles six million transactions a day." "Everything from selling dollars to buying a fishing license." "The Post Office has got more branches than all of the bank branchs in the UK put together." "So when you've got a computer system this complicated and this big, is it possible that things can go wrong?" "Any computer system can go wrong." "What's important is the way that you deal with things when they do go wrong." "Sometimes Horizon transactions go astray and that can make it look FAs there is cash missing." "The postmaster using the computer can make mistakes too, usually errors are spotted and corrected." "But Jo found Horizon difficult to operate." "And when she reckoned up, the computer kept saying cash was missing." "I rang the help desk and said I'm ?" "2,000 down." "She said, well, you can do this, this, this." "So I did exactly what she said and it doubled what I'd rung her up about." "So then I was minus ?" "4,000 down." "Under her Post Office contract, Jo had to pay back any short fall." "But the losses kept on coming." "She stopped putting in her own cash and signed off the official accounts any way, without declaring the missing money." "Why on earth did you do that?" "Because I didn't know how to get out of the situation I was in." "It was such a big amount of money that I knew it would finish the shop off." "I always thought one day naively it would sort itself out and that, you know, you press a button and bing, there it would be." "Jo pleaded guilty to false accounting and agreed to pay the Post Office the missing ?" "36,000." "In return, the theft charge was dropped." "The deal kept Jo out of jail, but what if the computer was part of the problem?" "I don't think it is a criminal act which she committed." "I think it's much more likely to have been a fault in the computer itself and the fact that she was pressurised into admitting to a criminal act, I think, doesn't mean that this miscarriage of justice should stand." "It needs to be overturned." "Jo Hamilton says the Post Office told her that she was the only postmaster having problems with Horizon." "That wasn't true. 150 postmasters formally complained about problems they experienced with the Horizon system." "We must have justice for the postmasters and postmistresses..." "This is a national scandal." "MPs are still demanding answers." "I would hope it wouldn't be necessary to have a full, independent, judicial inquiry to get to the bottom of this issue, but get to the bottom of the issue we must." "The Post Office says it already has." "It appointed a firm of independent experts called Second Sight to investigate the complaints about Horizon." "But now, in their first ever interview, even they say the Post Office's behaviour is troubling." "Horizon works reasonably well, if not very well, most of the time." "In any large IT system it is inevitable that problems will occur." "What seems to have gone wrong within the Post Office is a failure to investigate properly and in detail cases where those problems occurred." "It's almost like institutional blindness." "The Post Office has its own investigators and it brings private prosecutions." "It doesn't have to go through the police or the Crown Prosecution Service." "The police's work is checked by an independent organisation, the CPS." "In the Post Office situation, you have the prosecutors and investigators all working for the same organisation." "It becomes much more difficult to truly separate those functions and with the Post" "Office, I think, that creates potential risks of miscarriages of justice." "The Post Office says it complies with all legal requirements and has a duty to protect public money." "It says it only prosecutes where there's a realistic prospect of conviction and never for making innocent mistakes." "Its exhaustive investigations have provided overwhelming evidence that Horizon was not responsible for missing money." "So what have we got here?" "Oh, crikey." "This is the black box." "Once they moved the Post Office down there and put a new letter box, they came and did this at the same time." "Noel Thomas used to be the post master in his village in Anglesey." "His post box used to be red." "I felt" "I'd been a loyal servient as a postmaster and a postman before that." "I started in 1965." "Happy memories, going out, meeting people." "Yes, it was good behind the counter as well." "The Post Office had a problem at the branch in 1996." "I was running another Post Office at the time in the middle of the island." "I was called back and they said there was money missing from the office. ?" "11,000 had gone, a member of staff was sacked and Noel agreed to pay back the cash." "All was well until" "Horizon arrived." "It kept saying money was missing, so Noel phoned the helpline." "I said to them, I'm positive there's something wrong with the computer system because this money is disappearing." "So you said to the Post Office, is there a problem with the Horizon system?" "What was their answer?" "They said no none and that I was the only person that had a problem." "Noel signed off the official accounts without declaring the missing money." "When the Post Office came for an audit, he was ?" "50,000 short." "They don't know where the money is." "I don't know where the money is." "And still they haven't found the money and I haven't got it." "Did you steal it?" "No." "How can you prove that you didn't steal it?" "The style of living." "I had a second-hand Saab." "If" "I had minced that kind of money, I'd have had a better car than that, believe you me." "And I lived a decent life." "I worked hard." "My wife worked hard." "Noel was charged with theft and false accounting." "Just like Jo" "Hamilton he says he reached a deal before going to court." "He pleaded guilty to false accounting and the theft charge was dropped." "Their barrister stood up and dropped the theft." "My barrister talked to me and said, you've got to plead guilty to false accounting." "Noel hoped the deal would keep him out of jail, when he was sentenced." "The judge came in and he said "nine months"." "I waited for a suspended sentence and he said, "Take him down." I spent my 60th birthday in prison." "But should" "Noel have been charged with theft in the first place?" "In paperwork we've obtained, the Post Office now says that although theft by Noel - or somebody else - can't be ruled out, it accepts that the missing money was probably caused by "operational errors"." "The Post Office says:" "It cannot comment on individual cases because of confidentiality." "Horizon is effective and robust and is independently audited." "It's been used by nearly 500,000 people and the overwhelming majority haven't complained." "The man who led the Parliamentary campaign believes the" "Post Office has unfairly prosecuted postmasters." "It's certainly an abuse of power." "It's a big organisation bullying individuals with no ability to cope, in ways which sometimes see them sent to prison, made bankrupt, lose their livelihood." "We own this organisation that's behaving in this way." "It's disgusting." "The Post Office says it's not a bullying organisation, and it's seen no evidence of miscarriages of justice." "But something seems to have changed." "In the five years up to 2014, the" "Post Office prosecuted an average of 33 postmasters a year." "Last year, it was two." "These prosecutions often rely heavily on the computer being right." "So Horizon has to work properly." "But if it doesn't fire on all cylinders, it might not be a reliable witness." "Second Sight reported that bugs in the computer system have created cash short falls." "Post Office disclosed to us two software bugs that had had quite a significant impact on a number of branches, and it took, in one case, over 12 months for those bugs to be detected and for the consequences to" "be appreciated." "The Horizon system is run by computer giant Fujitsu." "It won't talk about the system because it doesn't comment on the specifics of customer contracts." "But now, for the first time, a former insider has agreed to speak out." "He says errors on Horizon were far more widespread than have ever been reported." "The office was located in Bracknell." "We were on the sixth floor, which was pretty secure." "By the time you got in there, it was like Fort Knox." "There was a large team employed there, 30 or so of us." "We were all fulltime." "We were all pretty busy." "So, there were a lot of errors, a lot of glitches coming through." "There were errors in the system?" "Errors in the system." "People have been ruined financially and people have gone to prison." "Is it possible that suffering could have been caused because there are problems in the Horizon system?" "Yes, it is possible." "A team of computer technicians was dealing with Horizon errors, some of which he says could create false losses." "He also says financial records were sometimes changed remotely without the postmaster knowing." "That is something the Post Office has always said simply can't happen." "We went in through the back door and made changes." "Sometimes you would be putting several lines of code in at a time." "If we hadn't done that, then the counters would have stopped working." "What the Post" "Office are saying is untrue?" "From my perspective, yes." "His evidence could call into question the reliability of the computer records." "If financial data can be changed without the knowledge of the postmaster, is it safe to rely upon the computer's evidence?" "The Post Office says it cannot edit transactions as recorded by branches and that any corrections would be shown transparently in the records." "It says there's overwhelming evidence that losses were caused by user actions, including deliberate dishonest conduct." "So, the Post Office says the system is robust." "But Horizon seems to escape scrutiny." "Noel's computers were removed and tested, but the results have now been lost." "The Post Office said in a letter to me that they had sent them for testing and they had lost the correspondence, or couldn't find the correspondence." "In Jo Hamilton's case, Horizon was part of her plea deal." "As well as paying back the missing money, she also had to agree not to blame the computer." "Knowing what you know now, would you have done what you did?" "No." "I would have pleaded not guilty to theft and carried it all the way and said, "Well, you prove it then." That is what you do, you force them to court and make them produce evidence." "So, you might think that if a postmaster was put on trial for theft, the system would be fully investigated." "But is that true?" "One case that did go before a jury was that of Seema Misra." "Seema and her husband Davinder invested ?" "200,000 in their shop and Post" "Office." "When I applied for the Post Office, it was a good job, we were serving in the community and it was a good opportunity." "Seema says she struggled to get to grips with Horizon and couldn't understand why losses were being flagged up." "When things started getting wrong..." "You don't get any help and they basically are saying you are the only one, everybody else, we have so many other Post Offices, everybody else is doing fine, it is just your branch having the problem." "We were the only ones." "Find out!" "The Post Office provided extra training for" "Seema." "But she and her staff still made dozens of calls to the Horizon helpline." "The computer kept showing cash shortfalls." "Seema put in" "?" "20,000 of her own family's money to cover the losses." "But eventually, like Jo and Noel, she signed off her accounts saying there was more cash in the till than was really there." "When the Post Office came to audit," "?" "75,000 was missing." "Seema pleaded guilty to false accounting but not guilty to theft." "This time, the Post Office pressed ahead with the theft charge as well." "You didn't steal a penny?" "No." "So you say." "No, that is why I plead not guilty so I can get justice." "I haven't taken any money." "That is why I went to trial." "Once again, there was no direct evidence of theft." "Seema initially said the missing money must have been lost or stolen by staff." "Then, just before the trial, she heard about problems with Horizon." "It became part of her defence, but it didn't convince the jury." "There was no evidence that I have taken any money and then the jury came back with the verdict guilty." "What I had in front of me, my husband, my children, I was pregnant at that time..." "What was your sentence?" "15 months." "What was prison like?" "Terrible." "Terrible." "It was like a nightmare." "At one point I was thinking I'm not going to get out of here alive, I'll be dead." "Seema was jailed as a thief." "Was the star witness for the prosecution the computer ever properly cross-examined?" "The expert witness for the defence doesn't think so." "When I spoke to one of the Post Office investigators in relation to Seema Misra, they said as a matter of policy they would never consider an IT error as a source of discrepancy." "Seema's jury heard about one bug in Horizon, but there was no mention of any others." "Now, we have details of a meeting between the Post Office and Fujitsu." "The minutes warned of another computer bug that could cause a loss of confidence in the Horizon system if widely known." "The bug made money disappear." "This minute goes on to say that this bug could "impact upon ongoing legal cases where branches are disputing the integrity of" "Horizon Data." The bug didn't affect Seema's branch, but it is evidence that Horizon can go wrong." "So why didn't it come out at Seema's trial?" "The defence expert asked to see the technical logs of Horizon problems, but they were not disclosed to him." "It is difficult for me to see how a jury could properly take a view about Seema's guilt or innocence if they didn't have access to the understanding of the other faults on the system." "The jury convicted Seema unanimously." "But in every criminal case, disclosure is vital, so the question is, did she get a fair trial?" "There have been lots of cases in the past where inadequate disclosure by the prosecution have led to the collapse of prosecutions and have led, in some cases, to convictions being overturned, when that's been found out subsequently." "The Post Office still maintains" "Seema is a thief." "It says it always discloses relevant documents, even after a prosecution has concluded." "The Post Office says Second Sight has not identified any transaction caused by a technical fault, which resulted in a postmasterly being held responsible for a loss." "There may be more surprises in the post." "Second Sight has been sending out its final case reports to postmasters who have complained about Horizon." "Jo Hamilton invited us to be there when she opened hers." "God, I'm nervous." "In it, notes from the original Post Office prosecution file against her." "It says having analysed the Horizon print-outs and accounting documentation, I was unable to find any evidence of theft." "Back then, the Post Office's own criminal investigator had found no evidence of theft." "That there says I didn't steal anything - there is no evidence of theft, yet they charged me with it." "On 17th May, 2006, they wrote that." "Jo, personally, what does this document do for you?" "Well, it vindicates everything we've been saying all the years and, yeah, and it means that we can now take the fight to them." "Jo has lost her livelihood and her good name." "But in paperwork we have obtained, the Post Office now admits that the most likely cause of the losses was "operational errors"." "Not theft." "So, could there have been something else driving the theft charge?" "What was of interest to us was that a number of cases also started with an additional charge which was that of theft." "In a significant number of cases that theft charge was dropped in response to the defendant pleading guilty to false accounting." "The Post Office denies it, but" "Second Sight thinks they may have used theft charges as a tactic to put pressure on postmasters." "And Panorama has obtained evidence that seems to support this." "Internal Post Office documents talk about how a theft charge could make it easier to get a court order to make Jo repay the missing money." "One says, "I'm never confident with false accounting charges in relation to recovery." That's the recovery of the missing money they are talking about." "It says, "The theft charge makes life so much easier." The Post Office denies bringing prosecutions for financial reasons and says that losses and false accounting together are often sufficient evidence for a theft charge." "It says false accounting can contribute to branch losses by making it impossible to stop discrepancies." "The Post Office wholly rejects the extremely serious but unsubstantiated allegations." "The independent review by Second" "Sight was set up by the Chief Executive of the Post Office, Paula" "Vennells." "We are a business that does genuinely care about the people that work for us and if there had been any miscarriages of justice, it would have been really important to me and the Post Office that we surface those and as the investigations have gone through, we" "have had no evidence of that so far." "But postmasters, MPs and Second" "Sight are still not happy." "Some are now calling for Paula Vennells to resign." "I'm afraid I think it is time she went." "It's one of the most shocking things that I came across while I was a Member of Parliament." "I'm still utterly shocked by it." "The Post Office is a public body owned by you and me." "And yet, postmasters say there's been a cover-up." "Somebody somewhere knows what's going on and they are spending all this money trying to protect it from coming out." "The Criminal Cases" "Review Commission is now investigating the convictions of 20 postmasters to see whether miscarriages of justice have occurred." "Among them, Noel, Seema and Jo." "The sense of injustice is growing." "In the trial, they haven't been fair, they haven't provided all the information my solicitors were asking for." "And the postmasters are determined to clear their names." "We are not going to stop until they address what they have done." "And be held to account for what they've done." "The question now being asked is, not who stole the money, but in the first place was there a crime?"