POST OFFICE SCANDAL
Late review
B ETTER late than never the Financial Reporting Council has said it will investigate the Post Office’s auditor, EY (Ernst & Young until 2013), which signed off accounts that depended on data from the deeply flawed Horizon IT accounting system.
The investigation will, however, cover just four years starting in 2014 and is bound to miss many of the beancounting failures at the heart of the scandal. Errors proliferated as soon as Horizon was rolled out in 1999, but successive Post Office leaders took comfort from EY’s annual reassurance that the accounts were free from material error.