£75K is a lot of money if it’s cash in hand but goes nowhere near to putting her back where she would have been if she’d been allowed to run a successful PO and Village shop throughout.

This is where it becomes a little tricky, I run a ‘successful village shop and postoffice, but it’s definitely not a money maker – no pension, savings have gone into the shop in the last 12 months due to inflation etc. many village shops have shut or become ‘community shops’ in the last 15 years. It’s a I dieing trade.

Yes I’m Definitely a wtb guy, 142 on the MTB.
The fusion form has a different shell design, with rails suspended and less room for padding though

It’s not totally ludicrous to imagine that once people realised how messed up Horizon was they could have used the confusion to take advantage. It’ll be really hard in all the noise to know that. And the genuinely innocent have concerns that it possibly leaves a smudge of doubt over them still, which they don’t want.

You’ve got to remember that a verity of bugs in horizon have been found, which were the basis of the convictions. From transactions doubling to stocktake shortfalls increasing daily/weekly/monthly. So identifying one of these bugs in transaction logs should be possible. But this data has been hidden from the prosecuted post masters.

PO also know how much cash has been delivered to the offices and also how much cash has been withdrawn or used in transactions. So if these figures match (as is Jo Hamiltons case) no wrong doing can be found. Again data not provided to defendants, but the independent auditors did find cases like this.

If we as postmasters took cash or stamps/stock out of our safes it would be pretty obvious and traceable, equally if we digitally deposited it in to our own account tried to hide it digitally some way. If we miss sell a single stamp we know about it at the end of the day! We did a monthly stock take last night and  we’re a few £ up, I know that I should be within that figure for the rest of the month and it also gives me a little buffer if we miss sell a stamp between today and the next weekly stock take when figures can be rectified.

Most wrongdoing convictions you hear of outside of the horizon issues are postal item thefts, staff stealing items to put on eBay or whatever. Again theres are easy to spot once PO are altered to them, but more difficult to prove than cash theft as warrants are quite often required – which is why is so shocking that PO went after so many PM’s for cash theft, all while knowing it was the system and not the individuals. It’s in the paper’s today the bonus were given out to investgatiors? for convictions so this could have have had significant impact as they were easier to catch and convict than a physical thefts of post.

I got the impression that Fujitsu aren’t/weren’t accused of changing the live data, rather that this undermined the legal argument for sub-post masters being made entirely responsible for their own balance sheets.

Fujitsu cirtainly did have access too and could change live data with no ones knowledge to any post office across the country – they could change live data logged in under a postmasters (or anyone else’s) login details without the PM ‘s knowledge whilst the postoffice was open. They could also login over night, mess with figures and log out again. Fujitsu witnesses have stated this.

PM’s at the time were told that only they had access to their own offices systems.

Ive no issues with TB announcing post office plans to go digital – he was the PM at the time and PO was a public body. I’d be surprised if he didn’t announce it.

However 90,000 postoffices in the roll out in 1999!!! We are at 11500 now. I think I’ve already said this, bug I wonder how many profitable and needed offices shut directly due to issues with horizon?

Unfortunately id say it’s a case of walk-in into a branch and arrange an appointment…..

An expert’s view against a solitary postmaster…. Vs the same story being told by 500+

Like I said on page 3, all postmasters and sub postmasters were asked a couple years ago if they had had incurred significant unexplained losses due to horizon between 1999 to current, and if they would be prepared to pursue postoffice for repayment. From what I’ve heard they had around 8000 responses.

There have been 500+ convictions, but I bet there isn’t an postoffice in the country that doesn’t have a story about how horizon didn’t match up when audited, or ‘bugs in the system’.

Bear in mind that for quite a few MPs, they will only just have heard about this.

It may have come to the forefront of public attention, but the postoffice / horizon issues havet been raised in the house of commons for at least 10years.

 Aside from anyone paying vague attention to the trials and the public inquiry. Like the government should have been.

Especially as the government/British tax payers own 100% of all shares in the post office. Many of Sunak’s sound bites to the press over the last few days over this have been factually incorrect or misleading themselves.

Potential legislation to quash subpostmaster convictions en masse, apparently.

I’ve no idea how they would be able to do this, there talk of any convictions that used the horizon systems accounts as evidence to be quashed – big that would be all post office convictions since 1999 as horizon is the only accounting system post office use on site. So any real wrong doing as well as the falsely accused.

Out of interest what do you get when people are just withdrawing cash from their pension for example?

Cash withdrawals are one of our smallest renumeration – many shops will also have a standalone cash machine as you make more commission on them.

I would imagine it has the potential to be incredibly complex. Fraud investigations always are, added to the sheer scale of this and obfuscation and technical smokescreens thrown up by the PO and Fujitsu.

It’s not just fraud allegations – theres potentially around 6 or 7 different crimes that may/have been committed including attempting to perverse the Courts of Justice.

not to diminish the point you were making – but 11500*600*15 is not 10 Billion.

I added a decimal place – it’s over 1billion….

The point is that PO currently have11500 offices. What if they regularly have lots of small losses which need the subpost master to make up with their own cash, for example 11500×600=  £6.9million.
Even if that horizon anomaly happens once a year in every office between 1999 and 2014 that’s over £10billion.

Also there were over 15000 postoffices in 2005, so you can increase that figure significantly. I wonder how many shut down, and we’re happy to do so because of losses incurred by horizon – the scandal goes much deeper than the personal losses incurred by postmasters. The community and cultural loss hasn’t even been looked at.

As for 300 a month, like I said our po wasn’t performing at the time (would have been one of the worst cases I’d seen). We’ve significantly increased trade since, but yes it’s not a money spinner for us. We don’t get a wage, we work on comission which is pence per item not pounds.

It comes as 50 new potential victims of the scandal have contacted lawyers following an ITV drama about the issue.

☝️From the BBC story

All postoffices and current/previous subpostmasters were asked a couple years ago if they had had any losses suspected due to the horizon system and if they would be willing to bring a new case.

The rumor within the PO community is that over 8000 ! of the 11500 current postoffices replied.

We are deep enough in the thread for our story now I think.

We bought a shop and postoffice’ in 2015, sank life savings into it rather than a house, the shop was cheaper than a mortgage deposit as it was failing. Wife had been working there part time, I worked for a supermarket as a PM so knew a fair bit of how to run a shop, even though I was in the head office side.

2months later in we had a -£600 anomaly appear in horizon on the monthly stock take (no warning before on daily or weekly cashups). Took three days of discussion with the help desk and alot of stress trying to sort it, wife couldn’t work out what she had done wrong etc. Well £600 was around 2months earnings on po at the time so we said we’d pay it but cancel our contract and shut down the PO (as if it happened regularly we’d be making a loss) as we were with our rights at the time to cancel the contract. Within an hour post office ‘found the issue’, a glitch in the system and remotely sorted it out. This would have been 2016 so PO would have been well aware of the issues horizon has.

As we lost no money, and didn’t have to pay, we haven’t pursued – but I’ll bet every postoffice operating prior to 2014 would have had ‘issues’ and lost money.

The shop has been doing a fair bit better in recent years and we’ve doubled the postoffice trade. This year we’ve had to sink the rest of our savings into it though as inflation has hit hard. Next year will be interesting if stock prices continue to rise.

Could be one of the better bikes in a local shop? So what was available.

Thankfully post office and Fujitsu parted ways a few years ago. We’ve a new system replacing Horizon over the next couple of years – not sure who the partner company is though.

I’ll be tolerant of the ads when they come as it’s quite rare that I watch anything on Amazon, the wife may watch more things on it than I do though so I’ll see if she notices and give her the option – I mainly pay for Amazon prime for the convenience of next day delivery, as I live rurally with limited access to shops.

Yeah we thought that – when they were looking at houses sub 120k in ep1 saying “what are we gonna do? We can afford these!” And end up in a bloomin nice house in Snowdonia – if we lost our life savings and postoffice now, no chance I could afford to buy any house….

It wasnt just cash, and they couldn’t just count it as they had no access to their electronic ledger.

That was only after they were audited and suspended. We have access to transaction logs, which is how Mr bates flagged his issue with horizon – some transactions in his case we being doubled and logged twice. He went through every daily transaction and could reverse the duplicates. He still ended up with a £1200 deficit which PO blamed him for.

We as sub postmasters have to do weekly and monthly audits on Wednesdays. Count all the cash and stock and check it matched the system – this is when it flags a cash discrepancy. In Jo Hamilton’s case she phoned the help line to resolve it and the fix doubled her digital discrepancy, it the doubled it again every week when ever she did a weekly or monthly audit but she manually lied to the  system and said she was holding the cash (hence being convicted of false accounting). At this point she still had access to the digital log of cash in and cash out.

Well, no, the issue is/was the software was (as far as the sub postmasters were concerned) producing wrong numbers that didn’t match the cash they had to hand. Doesn’t matter if you took £1000 or £10,000 in a day if it’s not your money and the system says you should have £1100/£10100.

A cash audit showed no wrong doing…. In fact, this is why no wrong doing could be found in the initial investigation to Jo Hamilton, it’s just that PO only looked at the digital figures and decided to prosecute based on digital figures only, not stock delivery and stock take (the actual cash and stock held in the branch). They disregarded the cash deliveries completely.
I run a post office, cash goes in, cash goes out we know how much cash we have on hand at all times we don’t have control of the digital side. It was the digital side the horizon introduced that was in the wrong not the cash.

Our government can’t do anything remotely efficiently. Anybody really think they are spying on us en masse?

Personally it’s not the government that worries me. Purchase history and data is already a huge commodity in its self worth hundreds of billions. The value of the data that supermarkets gain from reward cards is massive and that’s just one small sector. If 100% of our purchases are digital the data and spending habits that information gives is going to be worth a fair bit more.

Exactly – it’s a prime example for cash.

No party comes out of this with their hands clean

100%. I know many postmasters who will never vote libdem due to Ed Davey’s involvement, or lack of.

I’d have thought that speaking English as a second language would have had an influence cirtainly to investigations, but I don’t think that the bugs in the horizon system itself would have targeted people based on race.

But can a store take fake money off people and then go “sorry, bye!” Let alone being obliged to even? This feels like shaky ground to me.

If people try to deposit or use fake cash in the post office this is exactly what we are instructed to do. Same for most of the larger chain shops I believe.

It’s not clear whether race played a part either.

I don’t think this was a factor, as it was people from all different walks of life and parts of the country.

Of course if the criminal had taken that money out of the victims purse or sock draw, they would be totally out of luck/pocket with no comeback whatsoever.

Unless they had home insurance 🤷‍♂️

Barclays charge me the same fees if I pay in over their counter or at the Post Office.

I’m with Santander (small business ac) bank charges are £40 a month with a deposit limit per year (over 250k?) And a 2.5k deposit limit per day at postoffices (unlimited at the bank). I don’t think they do it anymore though….

“if” being the operative word

If you think that a business is a tax dodger don’t do business with them – the point is the till logs the transactions which businesses base accounts on, regardless if it’s cash or card. If they put the cash in their pocket and not in the till, then yes they are probably tax dodgers. But the same can be said for card machines, I could change the depositing bann to a personal account,  Or sell business stock through a personal eBay account and not declare it on my tax return. Just because someone accepts cards, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t doing tax.

I don’t see a need to spend with cash when a number of banks/cards are offering cashback with every purchase (eg 1% at Chase)

Yes, because the card provider is still making money and charges more than 1% for the transaction 🤷‍♂️.

Interesting, I thought the CC provider refunded it directly; didn’t realise the retailer got stung.

When a retailer gets stung by a chargeback the retailer has to prove the transaction was taken in good faith with their card provider, this could include checking the time, check the cameras and work out who it was etc. obviously the retailer doesn’t get paid for this. If you can prove it was in good faith the card provider usually has some sort of insurance that will cover the retailer and will payout to the defrauded customers bank. However the retailer will have a black mark on it’s chargeback rating, too many chargebacks could mean a blacklisting by all card machine providers.

Every time they overlook the small detail of paying the tax due on the £10 worth of takings.

If it goes through the till as cash or card, the tax is still paid. 🙄

Likely to be either tossed in the penny jar, lost, put in the charity tin (benefit to the charity yes, but not you) or needlessly spent just for the sake of it.

You need to look after your money better…. 

Christ how much do the machines cost? Can you not get a better deal?

Machine rental is around £15 a month, card fees depend on what card you use but I’m currently on 0.5p per transaction and and average of 1.7% of total transaction.

As our card transactions have increased we renegotiated a far better deal, it used to be 5p per transaction £20pcm for the machine and 2.2%. so I’m on a far better deal than I was.

These are often fixed term contracts too so your locked in even if you increase trade.

the chippie near me has a minimum spend of £5 for card/contactless transactions

I bet that they are using a sumup or izettle for card transactions?They generally have higher fees but put less restrictions on the retailer. All of the main card reader companies and banks will black list a retailer who put minimum spends on transactions.

I can only deduce it’s from a tax avoidance scheme around not declaring 100% of cash sales.

Nope – I’d just rather not pay the thousands of pounds I have to for the machine and transactions every year. My cash sales get banked daily and I pay less than £500 a year for the bank account (even if I took 100% of sales in cash it found be a fixed fee). I’d still have to pay for the bank account even if I took zero cash.

Seems to me that all transactions are cash, take that away and how else would they fund / pay for it ?

They’d find a way, how do you think they hide the cash? It all has to go digital eventually.

Just… can we please discontinue 1p and 2p coins?

+1 for this 😂

I’ve loads of riding from my door, I can piece together a 90% offroad 30+mile loop quite easily – we’ve great riding in the area too. But god I’d be bored if I had to always ride from home.

Part of MTB to me is going to new places and exploring, can be a trail centre or a mountain range.

I’d say at least 70% of my riding this year has started with a car journey to a destination.

It costs you to take cash. Maybe those costs are not as discrete or visible, but they are there.

It costs shops to take cash, you just don’t see it at the transaction level.

Personally for my small shop, I make money taking cash from withdrawals and deposits and loose money when customers pay by card – the smaller the transaction on the till the bigger the loss and the more my prices will have to increase (anyone remember card payment minimum spends in shops?).
The counter argument to cash is always – “but some has to spend time banking it! And you have bank fees associated to cash!” Complete BS.
Firstly most small business owners don’t ‘charge’ for all the hours spent doing work, so banking cash occasionally really isnt an issue. Ok yes they may send a member of staff to bank it for them but that’s their choice not yours. However cards add a cost which is comparatively non negotiable for business and that’s 100% the customers choice not the business.
As for bank fees – banks have a small business accounts most don’t charge for cash deposits. Again this is the businesses decision not the customers as to which account and bank and fee they use.
Cards are a convenience but we all pay for that when using them. The increase in card transactions since 2020 has had an impact on prices and the cost of living – especially in the food sector which my shop is part of.

Absolutely not.

The main downside – around 2% of everyone’s wages will go to banks. Prices will increase etc everything you ever buy will be traceable, everywhere you go will be traceable. The data around cards and purchases is already sold and is significantly valuable.

😍

Went on a few big group rides in Europe about a decade ago, people used a range of methods from a verity of hard case boxes, soft bags and cardboard boxes. But the guy that flew the most with a bike used a thick clear plastic bag and parcel tape – said he’d never had an issue after many trips as the baggage handlers could see it was a bike and took more care of it. However I used a rigid box in bba style and also didn’t have an issue.

Adding a battery and a motor makes it worse by a fair degree though to be fair. At a time when, collectively, we should be looking to reduce environmental impacts as much as possible.

I agree, to some extent – but are you going to give up MTB completely purely because it’s lack of environmental credentials?