26 January 2024 , 15:12
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A former Post Office investigator has said she was afraid to challenge experts behind the flawed IT system as "if you started to challenge too much, it didn't go well."
Suzanne Winter, who worked on criminal probes in Northern Ireland from 2001 to 2014, said she was not taught to look for errors and her training college told her the Horizon programme "was 100% reliable".
Ms Winter told the Post Office inquiry that staff were under pressure to recover cash from postmasters accused of false accounting and theft. Investigators were ranked from one to five based on how much money they were able to claw back, she said.
Ms Winter was involved in the probe into subpostmaster Alan McLaughlin, who was wrongfully convicted of false accounting in 2005 after £10,000 went missing from his Belfast branch. His conviction was overturned in 2022. Ms Winter also worked on the case of Maureen McKelvey, from Omagh, who reported £30,000 shortfalls at her branch. Despite eventually being found not guilty, the stress of her five-year wait for the acquittal caused her thyroid to rupture - resulting in major surgery.
Ms Winter told the probe: "You were not told how to get any information from Fujitsu (the firm that developed the Horizon programme), because we were told that the system was 100% reliable." Asked when she was told that, she said: "Whenever you were at the training college."
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She admitted finding statements submitted by Fujitsu staff to help her investigations "hard to follow" and said she didn't have access to anyone in the Japanese firm. "I had to put my request through casework if I wanted anything from Fujitsu, and as far as I am aware, casework then dealt with that," she said.
"About nine years in, our casework team then got a Fujitsu liaison person, and that is the person that we would deal with then if we wanted anything from Fujitsu." Counsel to the inquiry Emma Price asked why she didn't seek clarification.
She replied: "Because it seemed to be the technical side - they were being reported as the expert of the computer and you were more or less, in the Post Office where we were, if you challenged anything... you didn't feel you could challenge anything."
Asked if any individual made that case, she said: "No, I wouldn't say any particular individuals, but you just got the impression that if you started to challenge too much, it didn't go well."
Ms Winter was set a target of 65% for the recovery of money from those who were under investigation. The ex-investigator also described the performance ranking system she and others were judged on, saying: "We could see everybody else's, but... I didn't go looking to see what is everybody else doing. I was just concerned with what I had been targeted to."