The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has charged two solicitors connected to the Post Office scandal, the regulator announced, in proceedings that centre on their alleged failure to appear at a public inquiry and alleged overcharging.

The charges mark the regulator's latest intervention in the long-running fallout from the Horizon IT scandal, which has already produced criminal convictions, mass overturnings of prosecutions and a statutory public inquiry. The two solicitors now facing SRA charges were linked to the scandal, according to the Law Society Gazette, which first reported the development.

The first limb of the allegations concerns non-appearance at an inquiry. The SRA alleges that the solicitors did not attend when called upon to give evidence. The second limb concerns fees. The regulator alleges that the solicitors overcharged in connection with work tied to the Post Office matter.

Both allegations will now be tested before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT), the independent tribunal that adjudicates allegations of misconduct against solicitors in England and Wales. The SRA acts as prosecutor before the tribunal; the SDT determines guilt and any sanction, which can range from fines to strike-off from the roll.

The charges follow years of scrutiny of the legal profession's role in the Post Office affair. Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted hundreds of subpostmasters based on data from the faulty Horizon accounting system. Those prosecutions, many of them private prosecutions brought by the Post Office itself, led to wrongful convictions that the Court of Appeal and lower courts have since quashed in large numbers.

The public inquiry into the scandal, chaired by Sir Wyn Williams, has examined the conduct of lawyers on all sides, including those who advised or represented the Post Office. Inquiry hearings have repeatedly focused on the conduct of in-house and external lawyers, and several solicitors have faced questions about their professional conduct during the period under examination.

For practitioners, the charges carry two practical signals. First, the SRA appears willing to treat failure to appear before a statutory inquiry as a disciplinable matter in its own right, not merely as a procedural lapse. Second, fee arrangements entered into in connection with high-profile scandal-related work remain open to regulatory challenge years after the fact.

Solicitors facing inquiry summonses should treat attendance obligations with the same seriousness as court orders, and should ensure fee agreements with clients — particularly vulnerable clients in scandal-related claims — are documented, proportionate and defensible on review.

The SDT has not yet heard the case. A hearing date has not been announced. The solicitors are entitled to defend the allegations before the tribunal, and no findings of misconduct have been made against them at this stage.

The SRA declined to comment beyond confirming the charges, consistent with its standard practice of not elaborating on live proceedings before the tribunal. The Gazette's report did not name the two solicitors.

The outcome of the tribunal proceedings will be watched closely by the profession. Any sanction imposed by the SDT would add to the growing body of professional-conduct fallout from the Post Office scandal, which has already engulfed prosecutors, executives and expert witnesses connected to the Horizon litigation.

A spokesperson's statement was not quoted in the report. The SRA's case file will set out the full particulars of the charges when the matter proceeds to tribunal.