COMPUTER SAYS PAY HMRC is set to get powers to take unpaid tax straight from people's bank accounts, @thetimes reports. Postmasters were once told a computer proved they owed money. It didn't. Who checks HMRC's figures before the money goes? @HMRCgovuk

AUDITED TO DEATH Jayakanthan Sivasubramaniam took his life hours after auditors raided his branch. @PostOffice has been so sorry about it that it refused his widow a penny. Jayakanthan was 35 and a father of two. He ran three convenience stores in south west London and had recently taken on a Post Office branch in Putney. In March 2005, Post Office investigators raided that branch in what the company calls an audit, and he took his own life a few hours later !!! His wife, Gowri Sivasubramaniam, had taken their two children to a family birthday party. She came home and found him. Gowri says two investigators took files from the store and locked her husband out that day, according to her account to MPs on the Business Committee. Post Office said £180,000 had gone missing from the cash machine and the safe. @itvnews correspondent John Ray reported in April 2024 that there is no proof of what happened to that money, only unanswered questions, which is a lot of accounting for something that cannot be accounted for. Speaking publicly for the first time, Gowri told ITV News she believes Post Office is to blame. She waited 20 years to say it, and Post Office is still working on its reply. For anyone new to this, Horizon is the computer system Post Office used to record branch accounts, and it made money look missing that was not there. More than 700 branch managers were convicted on its data and the system was later found to be faulty. For years the company called it robust, which is a brave review for software that wrecked hundreds of lives. Gowri says that in the weeks after he died, Post Office kept writing to her to chase the missing money. She rebuilt her family's life, spent time in Sri Lanka and settled in Liverpool. When the Horizon scandal became public, she applied to the Horizon Shortfall Scheme in August 2020, which exists to compensate people hit by Horizon shortfalls. About 3 years later she got her answer, so nobody can say they rushed... The answer was - NO. A Post Office letter, reported by The Times @thetimes, said the contract was held by her husband's company, so the scheme does not extend to her claim. The panel that decides these claims, which Post Office and the government describe as independent, said it had no reason to doubt that the audit had a profound impact on him and ended with him taking his own life ... ... It then said the discrepancies found at the audit could not, on the balance of probabilities, be presumed to be Horizon shortfalls. So the audit ended his life, and as far as the scheme is concerned, the audit does not count. Nobody wrote that rejection by accident. A person chose every word and a person chose to send it to a widow. I assume customer satisfaction is through the roof. Here is the SHOCKING (?!) part. According to ITV News, even Post Office accepts there is no Horizon transaction data for his branch and only limited relevant documents. A panel has therefore ruled on what a computer did with no data from that computer, which takes real confidence ... Kevan Jones, then a Labour MP and now Lord Beamish, sits on the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board. He told ITV News Post Office has either destroyed or lost records and that the benefit of the doubt should go to the victim. Misplacing the evidence is a remarkable way to win an argument. He also told The Times the case revealed a complete lack of compassion from Post Office and the panel, and he demanded that it be reopened. Compassion, it seems, was out of stock.. Then came a statement, which costs nothing and pays nothing. Post Office told ITV that every claim is assessed by an independent panel, that its offer can be disputed and re-examined, and that it is deeply sorry for the pain and suffering Horizon has brought to many people. It also recognises that the claim relates to truly tragic circumstances. Read that statement slowly. Post Office has cast Horizon as the only villain in this story, because Horizon shortfalls are the only thing the scheme pays for, and a computer makes a very convenient villain since it cannot answer back. The raid, the lock-out and the payment reminders never make it onto the form, which is handy for the people who sent them! Then Post Office hands the verdict to a panel and calls that independence. Deciding what a computer did at a branch with no computer records is playing God, and even the real one would check the file first. In a letter filed with the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry @PostOffInquiry, a barrister acting for Gowri says the only known surviving document about her husband's case is the investigation report Post Office wrote in 2005. The barrister says Post Office accepts that the report points to a gap between the cash in the machine and the machine's printouts, which Post Office says is not related to Horizon. So the company is marking its own homework ... In that letter, dated 5 September 2024, the barrister argues that cash machine accounting was known to be flawed, citing a 2013 report on Post Office fraud and compliance. The letter says Simon Recaldin of Post Office had asked Gowri for more information about where the audit shortfalls came from, almost 20 years after the event, and the barrister calls that utterly unrealistic. So finding the evidence is now the widow's job. In July 2025, the chair of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, Sir Wyn Williams, reported that at least 13 people are thought to have taken their own lives because of the scandal. He criticised an unnecessarily adversarial attitude from Post Office and its advisers towards redress and called for close family members to be compensated. It took a public inquiry to suggest the families might be owed something... Post Office is 100% owned by the government.. Sources @thetimes @itvnews @Telegraph @EasternEye @TamilGuardian

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