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UK taxpayers may should pay as a lot as £1bn in compensation to former Submit Workplace staff wrongly convicted of theft as a result of faulty Horizon IT system.
The system, which was put in by the Submit Workplace and equipped by Fujitsu, falsely advised there have been money shortfalls, resulting in 736 unsafe convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting in what is among the greatest miscarriages of justice in British authorized historical past.
The Submit Workplace has stated it can’t afford to foot the large cleanup invoice for the scandal and final month the federal government, the service’s solely shareholder, confirmed the taxpayer would step in.
This weekend new particulars of the potential magnitude of the compensation programme emerged.
The Submit Workplace Scandal weblog by the journalist Nick Wallis, who has written a e-book on the fiasco, reported that the Division for Enterprise, Power and Industrial Technique (BEIS) has now made three grants accessible to the Submit Workplace that complete simply over £1bn.
The newest grant, made final month, was for £686m, and got here on prime of earlier awards of £94m and £233m. In his submit, first reported by the Sunday Instances, Wallis stated the figures concerned meant the Submit workplace Horizon IT catastrophe was now a “absolutely fledged £1bn scandal”.
Between 2000 and 2014, the Submit Workplace prosecuted 736 submit workplace operators primarily based on data from a just lately put in pc system referred to as Horizon. A few of the staff had been jailed following convictions for false accounting and theft, and plenty of had been financially ruined.
Nevertheless, it was the software program, which contained bugs, errors and defects, that had brought on the issues, in line with the excessive court docket judgment that quashed lots of the convictions.
Up to now, the Submit Workplace has provided compensation to 777 of the two,500 subpostmasters who’ve utilized. Those that had convictions overturned have been provided interim funds of £100,000 whereas their claims are assessed.
A spokesperson for BEIS stated the subsidy figures had been a “prime estimate of what may very well be wanted. It has not been spent and can solely be given to the Submit Workplace in arrears if and when required.”
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