Moral hazard, cobra effect, if all you have is a hammer, etc.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/10/post-office-exec...
To be unfair, the job they were tasked with was providing evidence to support the prosecutions. And Sewell was a strikingly unconvincing witness; "It was 2008. I don't remember." Apparently he remembered almost nothing that might have a bearing on the inquiry.
From the article:
> Mr Thomas, of the Post Office security team, told the inquiry there were “bonus objectives”, including a 40 per cent “loss recovery objective”, available to his team.
> Asked if that influenced his behaviour as an investigator, he said: “I’d probably be lying if I said no because… it was part of the business, the culture of the business of recoveries or even under the terms of a postmaster’s contract with the contracts manager.”
> In an email sent by Mr Thomas in 2021 to Nick Read, the Post Office’s chief executive, and which was disclosed to the inquiry, he wrote: “My yearly objectives that were bonus worthy at the time were based on numbers of successful prosecutions and recovery amounts of money to the business.”
> He also discussed “a proceeds of crime unit within Post Office Ltd that ensured some of these individuals lost their homes and families”.
> Mr Thomas was the lead investigator in the case of sub-postmaster Julian Wilson, who was convicted of false accounting and died of cancer five years before his conviction was overturned.
> Mr Thomas did not include any of the problems Mr Wilson had reported with the Horizon system when writing his report after interviewing him in 2008. Years later, Mr Thomas told a colleague he was “pleased” to have his hands on documents relating to Mr Wilson’s case because he wanted to prove there was “no ‘Case for the Justice of Thieving Subposters’” and that they “were all crooks”.