Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells knew that other people could remotely access Horizon, according to a leaked recording. In a taped meeting from July 2, 2013 obtained by ITV News at Ten, Ms Vennells and several other Post Office executives are spoken to by two forensic accountants who had launched an investigation into possible issues with the faulty IT system. Ron Warmington and Ian Henderson from the firm Second Sight had warned them that the Post Office was not being sufficiently transparent about the risk of branch accounts having been accessed remotely. At one point, they comment on the possibility of a "bloody whistleblower" making this knowledge public. Tapes show Post Office chiefs knew about Horizon IT scandal but kept jailing postmasters The pair said: "When you say they didn't have access to the Horizon system, but actually they were passing entries to live data...that is really dangerous ground. The last thing you want is a spot review response that says, categorically there was no access to live data from Bracknell. If in a week's time some bloody whistleblower pipes up to say, well, actually I was working on the second floor and we routinely did ‘X’." Paula Vennells - head of the Post Office between 2012 and 2019, and in charge when sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted - was voluntarily stripped of her CBE in February after "bringing the honours system into disrepute". Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of postmasters across the
UK were wrongly prosecuted due to faults in the Horizon computer software . The technology issues made it appear as if money was missing from branch accounts. Many victims were sent to
prison under convictions for false accounting and theft, and faced total financial ruin.