Winning damages for wrongly prosecuted subpostmasters became a defining project for Milsted Langdon. Practice Leader of the Year winner Roger Isaacs reflects on the awards, the eight-figure settlements and the cashflow gamble of paying 20 staff before a penny came in.
It’s not often you get to ask a forensic accountant who would play them in a TV drama about their work. Even less common is to get an answer. But then, Roger Isaacs, the recipient of the Accounting Excellence Awards’ Practice Leader of the Year, is no ordinary accountant.
The ITV dramatisation Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which follows the remarkable fight for justice for victims of the Post Office scandal, has been watched by over 13.5 million viewers to date. But while the four-part series ends on a relative high with convictions overturned, the issue of compensation is a story yet to be told.
For Isaacs and his firm Milsted Langdon, what started as an instruction from a firm of solicitors in Hull on a relatively small number of compensation claim cases for victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal soon morphed into a specialisation seeking damages for malicious prosecution for hundreds of subpostmasters.
“The ITV drama finished before we were instructed, but I can assure you that I've got Ben Affleck on call simply because he played the accountant in the eponymous movie,” Isaacs jokes. “We have a particular affinity to Ben Affleck portraying a day in the life of Milsted Langdon – just with slightly more AK-47 habits.”
Major miscarriage of justice
The Post Office Horizon saga has been described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in UK history. Between 2000 and 2014, the Post Office prosecuted 736 subpostmasters and subpostmistresses – an average of one a week – based on accounting anomalies arising from the Horizon system introduced from 1999.
In April 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of 39 former Post Office subpostmasters for false accounting, fraud and theft, leaving hundreds of overturned convictions potentially on the way after campaigners won a legal battle to prove the Horizon IT system – on which their convictions were based – was flawed.
To date, Milsted Langdon has been instructed on behalf of over 500 former subpostmaster claimants across five different compensation schemes and been instrumental in securing many millions of pounds of much deserved compensation. “At its peak, we were making a millionaire a week,” Isaacs says. In one case, extensive forensic accountancy evidence led to an eight-figure settlement.
Within a year of that initial instruction, Isaacs had successfully recruited a team of 20 forensic analysts to work exclusively on Post Office Horizon compensation cases. “Luckily, because of the high-profile nature of the scheme, I was able to put a post on LinkedIn, and we got some fantastic responses from very senior people who'd worked at places like the Solicitors regulation authority (SRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Many of them were semi-retired, were looking for a bit of pin money, and wanted to get involved because the work is interesting and challenging.”
Meanwhile, Isaacs outsourced some more routine tasks to a team in India. “They were effectively summarising HMRC disclosures. We’d get people's tax records going back 20 years, often in a fairly haphazard state, and the team in India were able to distil that into a spreadsheet that summarised their tax records.”
Negotiating free tariffs
Isaacs successfully negotiated fee tariffs with both the Post Office and the Department for Business and Trade, which meant that the aggregate fees for the project have amounted to a sum equivalent to about 50% of the entire billings of the firm. That it required less than 10% of the firm’s staff to deliver the advice meant that the project’s contribution to the bottom line has been exceptional.
“I had two very capable managers who worked incredibly hard, and their careers have gone in a trajectory that they never would have thought. They were both relatively junior when we first got instructed, but now if there was a mastermind episode and they were asked what was their specialty subject, I think they know more about Post Office claimants than anyone in the country and they're still up to their ears in it, because we're working on the latest compensation scheme.”
Despite the scale of work the Post Office claims have generated, Isaacs is grateful for the decision taken early on to create a separate team to work on them. “These projects can become overwhelming, and if you're not too careful when they finish, you look around and your day-to-day jobs have dwindled to nothing.
“We took a couple of members of staff and built a whole new team under them, rather than diverting the existing team to work on this project, so we still have a very vibrant forensic team that hasn't been distracted by the Post Office. That's been quite important.”
The fundamentals of cashflow have also been key, Isaacs says. “The risk of these sorts of big projects - especially when you're dealing with the government - is they're not exactly quick to pay you so when you have to pay 20 people's salaries for several months before you start getting any money, it’s a lesson in the importance of managing the firm's cashflow. Fortunately, we've got a very good finance partner, but we had to go to the bank to borrow some money because the cashflow implications were enormous.”
Another flood of cases
With no imminent end in sight and rumblings from government about yet another scheme in the pipeline, Isaacs is braced for another flood of cases. To say that the Post Office scandal has put Isaacs and his firm on the map would be no understatement. “It was genuinely a once in a career project,” Isaacs says, “and it's lovely to get these awards, and although it's often the person at the helm that gets the glory, it was really nice for the team to get some recognition.”
But when it comes to service delivery, the rollercoaster of the last four years has done little to change the firm’s approach to work. “If we hadn’t delivered a good service for the first few, we'd never have got the subsequent cases and that has continued. It’s about going the extra mile for the client,” Isaacs says. “It's been very gratifying to make a lot of people very rich,” he adds.