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.
The independent forensic accountants Second Sight played a key role in exposing the scandal, finding flaws in the Horizon computer system which generated false evidence of cash shortfalls at sub-post offices, leading to wrongful prosecutions of sub-postmasters.
Nine months before the committee met, Second Sight submitted a report on 8 July 2013 identifying computer bugs that raised doubts over the reliability of Horizon data used to prosecute sub-postmasters.
A week later, on 15 July 2013, the Post Office was warned in formal advice written by its own lawyer Simon Clarke that it was in breach of its legal duties because sub-postmasters who had been prosecuted should have been told about the bugs.
Yet the Project Sparrow minutes from April 2014 show Paula Vennells, Alice Perkins and the other members discussed closing or speeding up the mediation scheme and planning to pay minimal compensation to sub-postmasters.
The following year, in March 2015, as it prepared to submit its full report, 11 months after the decision had been taken, Second Sight’s contract was terminated and the Post Office brought investigation of the sub-postmasters’ cases in-house.
The original article contains 1,053 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
The independent forensic accountants Second Sight played a key role in exposing the scandal, finding flaws in the Horizon computer system which generated false evidence of cash shortfalls at sub-post offices, leading to wrongful prosecutions of sub-postmasters.
Nine months before the committee met, Second Sight submitted a report on 8 July 2013 identifying computer bugs that raised doubts over the reliability of Horizon data used to prosecute sub-postmasters.
A week later, on 15 July 2013, the Post Office was warned in formal advice written by its own lawyer Simon Clarke that it was in breach of its legal duties because sub-postmasters who had been prosecuted should have been told about the bugs.
Yet the Project Sparrow minutes from April 2014 show Paula Vennells, Alice Perkins and the other members discussed closing or speeding up the mediation scheme and planning to pay minimal compensation to sub-postmasters.
The following year, in March 2015, as it prepared to submit its full report, 11 months after the decision had been taken, Second Sight’s contract was terminated and the Post Office brought investigation of the sub-postmasters’ cases in-house.
The original article contains 1,053 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!