Post Office executives changed data on the Horizon IT systems used by post office operators without their knowledge as recently as last year, the public inquiry into the scandal has heard.
The inquiry was shown a letter from Calum Greenhow, the chief executive of the National Federation of Subpostmasters (NFSP) and a post office operator for 22 years, to the Post Office raising the issue in May last year.
“It has come to my attention that Post Office personnel are visiting postmasters, including audits, where area managers/auditors are entering stock values on to Horizon without either the consultation or agreement with the postmaster,” Greenhow said in the letter. He added that in one case the post office operator “wasn’t even present”.
The inquiry is examining the IT scandal, which involved hundreds of post office operators being prosecuted for shortfalls in their accounts based on evidence using the Horizon software which was later shown to be faulty. The scandal shot up the public agenda at the start of the year after ITV aired the drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
Tracy Marshall, the retail engagement director at the Post Office who was responsible for the relationship with the NFSP, was asked about the issue by the counsel for the inquiry.
Marshall said that while she was not part of the Post Office investigation into the practice, she was aware of the outcome.
“As a result of the investigation I believe Post Office held its hands up and said ‘absolutely this shouldn’t be happening’,” she told the inquiry. “That practice has absolutely been stopped now in branches. I’ve never had any accountability for the branch assurance team and it is certainly not something in our postmaster policy.”
The revelation about accessing post office operator systems without their knowledge, at a time when thousands of post office operators have said trust in general in the organisation is low, was raised by counsel as the inquiry looks at practices and culture at the Post Office.
One of the most damning historical revelations was the practice of staff at Fujitsu, which runs Horizon and controls access to post office operator transaction data, being able to remotely access branch operators’ systems and make changes. While Post Office executives knew of this ability in the early 2010s, executives publicly denied for years that the capability existed.
On Wednesday, Marshall gave testimony about her knowledge of the matter. Marshall told the inquiry that she had the “postmaster engagement” part of her role removed earlier this year.
In April, the inquiry was shown emails and letters between 2010 and 2011 involving Marshall showing that she knew about the remote access issue, which the organisation at the time had denied was possible.
Marshall, who joined the Post Office in 1998 and took on her current role in 2020, failed to mention her involvement with remote access in an 86-page witness statement made public by the inquiry on Wednesday.
In one email from 2011, Marshall said Fujitsu could access an individual branch remotely and “move money around”, but “this has never happened yet”. She went on to say that any remote changes would be “spotted and the person making the change would be identified”.
Giving evidence to the inquiry on Wednesday, Marshall said she was just repeating what she had been told by other senior executives because in her role she “certainly wouldn’t have known the ins and outs of the Horizon system or remote access”.
“I would accept here there are mails where I have relayed information to people that concern remote access,” she said. “I wouldn’t say I was involved … in anything involved in remote access. This was an area very much outside my expertise and comfort zone. I wouldn’t have written this without very clear direction from experts on what to say.”
In an undated letter circa 2011/12 to a subpost office operator who was appealing against allegations of financial wrongdoing, Craig Tuthill, a Post Office appeals manager, cited Marshall as saying she was “fully satisfied that the Horizon systems and the accounting processes around it are robust and fit for purpose”.
Marshall said the phrase used by Tuthill attributed to her would have been provided by the Post Office PR team.
Marshall said that after the remote access emails were shown at the inquiry, she was “asked to step back from some of my role in late May or early June this year”.
“I stood down from the postmaster engagement area of my role, a small part of my role,” Marshall said. “My role hasn’t changed, I have had some responsibilities removed from it.”
