POST OFFICE SEARCHED HIS HOME FOR £85K You fight off an armed robber and get an award. Then you get home and strangers are searching your house. They work for the @PostOffice and they are hunting for £85K. Meet Tom Brown, a postmaster from Stanley in County Durham with 30 years of service. In 2008 he ran the North Kenton branch in Newcastle. A branch audit said £85K was missing, and the Post Office decided he had taken it. For over a year he rang the Post Office helpline 2 or 3 times a month about missing cash. The helpline told him it would come back by itself. It never did. The Post Office suspended him the next day and sent a team to search his house. Tom Brown told them a man about to lose everything has no spare £85K lying around, and invited them to look. He was arrested too, then charged with false accounting, which is a posh way of saying fiddling the books. Picture strangers going through your home for cash you know you never took. Then picture your name splashed across the local papers next to the word stealing. Tom Brown later told the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry @PostOffInquiry that the shortfalls carried on after the Post Office put its own staff into the branch. He took that as a sign it was not him. Fair guess. In 2013 the Post Office dropped the case at Newcastle Crown Court and offered no evidence. It took nearly 5 years to notice it had none. The judge told him he would no doubt take it further. By then he had lost his business and his home and gone bankrupt. Reports put the total loss at around £500K. He ended up in social housing with his son and grandchildren. Tom Brown died in late 2023, weeks before the @ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office put the whole scandal into every living room. His compensation was still not finalised. All he asked for in his Inquiry statement was proper compensation and for someone to take accountability. His MP Kevan Jones told Parliament he never lived to see the compensation he deserved. That is how the Post Office says thank you. Sources @ChronicleLive @ComputerWeekly and others.