Any new compensation scheme may cause more pain for Post Office victims, according to an expert on the scandal.Nick Wallis, the journalist and author, wrote the book The Great Post Office Scandal, which provided the basis for the ITV drama that catapulted the issue into the public consciousness (see 16.22 post).Wallis said the government accepting the need for a new compensation scheme was important, but he warned "the devil is in the details". This revolved around what the Post Office minister Gareth Thomas (see our 15.12 post) said was the need for "contemporaneous proof"."I know people who are traumatised now, who are going through difficulties now, who may not have that contemporaneous evidence," Wallis said.He added: "So I wonder whether that word, contemporaneous, could put a fly in the ointment going forward."'Moving parts'Wallis went on to explain the issue with the Post Office compensation schemes.He said there were "so many different moving parts" with four schemes having been merged into three - and another on the way."Unless they really, really think through exactly what they're doing, they're going to cause an awful lot more problems for the victims," he warned."You'd think they would have learned from the mess we're all in at the moment."True scale of devastationWallis said one of the key findings of Sir Wyn's report was that at least 13 people may have taken their own lives after being accused of wrongdoing based on evidence from the Horizon IT system."For every suicide there's a family destroyed... even now, we're only still starting to understand the true scale of the devastation, not just the width of it, the 10,000 odd people, but real, real serious trauma visited on people," he told us., The British Post Office scandal, also called the Horizon IT scandal, involved the Post Office pursuing thousands of innocent subpostmasters for apparent financial shortfalls caused by faults in Horizon, an accounting software system developed by Fujitsu., The first report on the findings from an inquiry into the Post Office Horizon IT scandal has been published. It reveals for the first time the full extent of the suffering of sub-postmasters and .