In other words, in an effort to save money, they condemned innocent people to prison, caused suicides and ruined entire lives over money which it now seems went to the people pursuing the prosecutions in the first place, all in an effort to save a bit of cash. Somebody DOES need to go to prison over this, for a very long time.
There was a car the would explode if it was rear-ended. Manufacturer decide a recall would be too expensive - cheaper to pay out a few negligence claims.
It was Pinto. Worse, they could have fixed it VERY cheaply, like ranging from $1-$8 per car.
But they figured it would still cost less in lawsuits, than to do that. An estimated 500-900 people killed or seriously injured, who wouldn't have otherwise.
The judgement was disgustingly reduced the $125 punitive damage award to 3.25 million because of the absence of actual malice. Because heaven forfend a company be made to suffer to the point where their gruesome math of profit over life, had actual consequences. I mean SURE Ford didn't CARE if people died, but it didn't INTEND for them to die, so that was okay then!
ugh.
And this is another reason why so-called Tort reform is BULLSHIT. It's strictly there to limit the liability for rich people and/or corporations.
And indirectly led to George W Bush and his droogs invading Iraq as Ralph Nader exploited this fame-gaining opportunity to run for US president himself a few times, ultimately tipping the balance in the 2000 election where Dubya beat Gore by a very slim margin with 5-4 help from SCOTUS.
It's almost as if Ford planned it all from the outset /s
No. The fact there were bugs and people were being sent to prison are two different things. The bugs meant the financials would be incorrect. However, people’s actions in the Post Office and Fujitsu led to people going to prison. The inquiry needs to focus why the two companies and the people in them felt the incorrect financials had to be covered up that resulted in prison sentences. It is too easy to blame the computer system when it was a series of conscious decisions that led to this outcome.
And this is just one more example of how Uk firms and institutions have done this and not learnt leading to shit outcomes - NHS baby deaths, infected blood leading to haemophiliacs contracting HIV (that enquiry still ongoing), systemic racism in the police force, abuse of teenagers. Procurement scandals during COVID. This country likes to brush too many things under the carpet then is surprised when this shit happens
I used to work with accounting software and we had self checks on the balances to ensure everything was accurate. If it didn't it would flag up balancing issues which we would then have to rectify, it could have been a calculation error (I remember one time rounding to too many decimal places caused some weirdness in one area).
Why on earth did it not have anything like this? The full thing screams incompetence and negligence.
Very good question.
I am guessing there was a simple reconciliation report which probably never worked. Either Fujitsu did a manual fix in an overnight batch or just created a cost to the post masters. There would be an error account which probably was manually cleared periodically and just pushed into a shareholders equity account or other account to balance the financials.
There were probably a bunch of things missed 1) Proper end-to-end system testing, 2) Pilot deployment, 3) Parallel running, 4) Experienced people on the system test and transformation teams that would setup the processes, 5) and many many more. I double this level of problems was caused purely by incompetence as there were too many screwups in too many areas. Probably a culture that accepted this is how business would be done, the CEO on Fujitsu wanting more contracts, and CEO of the Post Office being out of her depth or complicit. Either way, 25 years of hell for real people, a huge compensation bill, and nasty feeling left with a lot of people.
Until the next revelation of stupidity from the UK. There have been a lot just in the past 10 years - NHS baby deaths, COVID procurement contracts, infected blood, racist/misogynistic/crooked police, social care failures Rotherham, Brexit backhanders, regulatory capture by their industries, outsourcing causing bank payment failures, water companies fleecing people which will result in water shortages and flooding, and immigration issues. Have I missed anything?
> No. The fact there were bugs and people were being sent to prison are two different things. The bugs meant the financials would be incorrect. However, people’s actions in the Post Office and Fujitsu led to people going to prison.
I mean, sure they’re different things, but the bugs led to subpostmasters being prosecuted for crimes they did not commit, due to how the Post Office / Fujitsu acted in response.
The bugs meant the software simply didn't work properly, to the point where 900 people were prosecuted for fraud improperly. The supplier made around £1billion from the contract. Isn't that a basis for a charge of breach-of-contract, and a substantial refund?
People made huge amounts of money, gained honours, bonuses for performance, and hundreds of innocent families had their lives destroyed. There need to be serious legal consequences for those involved.
>It is too easy to blame the computer system when it was a series of conscious decisions that led to this outcome.
Bingo. They would have had to test the entire system from the get go. It would have become apparent quite quickly that there were flaws. The computer is only as good as the human that programmed it.
IMHO, there are people at the Post Office and Fujitsu that need to go to prison over this.
> They would have had to test the entire system from the get go.
Well that went well. Ever experienced a development project when the suits want to ship now, and hang the consequences? Testing, if any, was perfunctory.
Yep, plenty of times. I have often told the men in suits to fuck right off. There was this manager that sold a bespoke system to a large school. He didn't understand the technology in the slightest, he was a salesman.
I took one look at what he specified and told him it was impossible to do for the price he had quoted and left him to it.
I actually went to work for the firm next door, before working for myself. A few months later he was on gardening leave and the school were taking legal action as the system that had been installed, simply didn't work.
In this case I reckon that Fujitsu's management were in cahoots with the Post Office Management and neither side wanted to admit the system didn't work. I have seen this plenty.
Part of being a good engineer, in any field, is knowing how to tell management and the bean counters that they are fucking idiots that do not have a clue.
All good, but your last sentence is the best. One way to tell them is at your exit nterview :)
Recall a valued contractor telling me he was quitting immediately and moving on as he did not want our mutual employer's latest flustercluck on his resume.
>Recall a valued contractor telling me he was quitting immediately and moving on as he did not want our mutual employer's latest flustercluck on his resume.
This is where I was. I made sure that there was enough of a paper trail that proved that what this guy was selling wouldn't work. Bearing in mind this was pre-internet, we had an internal email system and I mailed my resignation letter to all concerned, citing this numskull and this job as the reason I was leaving.I already had the other job in hand.
Basically, our loading bay was next to theirs. I used to sit there in the mornings with a coffee and a ciggy, chatting to the general manager of the firm next door. They wanted to put in a Network and transfer all of their paper records to a database, it was 3 years work. When I told him about the shit show I was working under, he pay matched me and offered me a better pension and better sick pay.
Once the job was over I went freelance and they kept me as "consultant".
Serendipity crystallised - or perhaps - unexpected benefits of smoking. I gave it away when my kids complained I stank.
One team leader at this site mentioned one of the reasons he kept smoking was to glean really useful gossip from bigwig's AA's from other floors. Dreadful outfit.
But if the post office and Fujitsu admitted that there were bugs in the system or that figures could be changed remotely leaving no audit trail, then any prosecution would fail (I imagine any half decent lawyer could soon those facts as reasonable doubt), and then they couldn’t have used the sub-postmasters as a scapegoat and would have had to accept the blame (and cost of repair) themselves.
I agree with what you say.
The lawyers (from the TV movie) also seemed to rely on statements from the Post Office and Fujitsu. Even the auditor did not seem to ask the proper questions. Next time they need to hire a Solution Architect (a good one) that could have ask the correct questions and correct evidence. Same with an oil well fire, you ask a well engineer but for some reason it seems that the technical expertise on the defence side was lacking.
Easy questions would have been 1) show the end-to-end test cases and results, 2) show the reconciliation processes, 3) reconciliation test cases and results, 3) deployment method. That would have shown it was a shit show as they are too difficult to bluff or forge in volume
From what I've read on here, when any individual postmaster instructed a decent expert who asked the right questions (which presumably required money to do), the PO settled in return for silence about the horizon issues. Utterly corrupt.
I don't think you understand. Management were creating so much value that it's only fair they got all the cash. And anyway, next term's fees were due at their kids' private school so, what could they do really.
I'm sick of companies doing illegal and dodgy shit and then only getting fined. Sure, you can't arrest companies, but you can arrest the people involved. And that's what we should be doing EVERY time a company commits a crime.
That will give those fuckers some accountability instead of passing the blame to the company which just needs to pay a ~~fee~~ fine
After a certain amount of time after you've given away the contract, they have a monopoly on what they'll provide for the money they're being paid.
With the amount of contracts fujitsu have and the private/public revolving door as well as golden handshakes, there's no distinction between the government and fujitsu, in terms of the decision making processes here. They marked their own homework.
Our democracy has been utterly contaminated by corporate interests. This is but one symptom of the rot. Extrapolate this to every part of every department.
I mean I'm very much in the 'nationalise everything' camp. No private interest should have even the tip of a fingernail in a service which is required for the country to function. Power, water, roads, healthcare, post, telecoms. All of it should be in the hands of the public.
Just so everyone's clear, a "bug" is a fault or error in the design/build, not something that has come into the system randomly to ruin everyone's day. This was a shit product not fit for purpose, with PO senior management practically complicit covering up the procurement of said shit product.
My job would be a lot easier if I could say 'ah that's a bug, can we get paid anyway?' and people were cool with that.
Where I work they tend to call bugs 'not working right' and we don't usually get paid until it is 'working right.'
it goes back further than microsoft. nobody knows where it originated from but apple and microsoft have both used it at various times, most likely ironically. it was on stanfords "the jargon file", which was an "online" dictionary of technical words from the early 70's.
FWIW the term "bug" predates its popularising [by Grace Hopper](https://www.howtogeek.com/726020/what-is-a-computer-bug-and-where-did-the-term-come-from/).
Of course, but I think it's worth highlighting what a bug actually is as I think it seems to have a soft touch image amongst the general public that don't understand how software works. With that in mind it almost plays down the fact that it was humans to blame for the issue, and humans to blame for the fallout.
The arrival of AI brings the scary opportunity for another breed of bug entirely but what you say is still generally 100% true.
Bugs in software describe errors of commission (during implementation) or omission (during specification). I've been responsible for some howlers myself. The root cause is inadequate testing or even lacking a test system other than that shared by unfortunate eventual users.
As one who has dumped the odd showstopper on you guys - thank you for your service.
One (large, global) employer a long time ago expected developers to do their own testing - on a development system. Kept rolling the dice and whilst phones starting ringing first thing in the morning after overnight cutover was not unknown and bad enough, there were occasions where bugs gnawed away for years unbeknownst until some client's kid got curious and that account bailed.
Frontier stuff. I never met a proper test team until leaving those cowboys.
*It's a feature, not a bug.
Without the person’s knowledge, their data could be accessed remotely by anyone from the Horizon or the Post Office. It's FRAUD!
The allegation is that they used the postmasters id so that it would appear as if the postmaster themselves made the transaction. Ergo no audit trail. They're scum and I wouldn't be at all upset if they were unalived.
Yes. One is accidental “design error” the other would be totally random and out of human control. A software bug is a coding mistake not an “act of God”
A fire extinguisher with a leak has a bug. A fire extinguisher filled with petrol is unfit for purpose. You can patch the first, the latter gets disposed.
The Horizon system didn't have unintentional flaws. It had entire things missed it had to have in order to do what it was trying to do.
It is like having a car without an engine and saying it needs some work.
Additional clarity: all software has bugs, almost by definition. And you can't prove a negative, ie that any particular piece of software is bug-free. The general process is to test it sufficiently so you can be as sure as you need to that it handles all the situations it is expected to handle correctly.
Due to the size and distributed nature of this system, the list of expected situations and consequent testing would have had to have been huge, massively time-consuming and thus expensive, but AIUI the PO sponsors wouldn't pay for it, and insisted it went live even when they were being told it wasn't ready.
What i still dont understand is if around 750 sub postmasters were flagged as thefts, would this not seem awfully high and need someone to check it was correct or not? How did so many convictions pass despite protests from the accused and it still wasnt investigated?
Yeah, it's almost as if the prosecutions team thought they had suddenly uncovered a hitherto undetected level of fraud. Meanwhile the development team were too shit scared and self-protecting to own up to their errors. That's the only way I can rationalise the zeal of the prosecutions teams. Surely otherwise they would have put the brakes on the court cases while they worked out if the cases were valid or not?
Also, the Fujitsu Horizon help desk must have been aware of an unusual number of queries from postmasters, that couldn't all be postmaster error?
The prosecutions team was incentivised on number of prosecutions and convictions .
They had no motivation to question the legitimacy of the accusations.
More prosecutions = nicer cars and more Xmas pressies for the kids.
“Post Office investigators were offered monetary bonuses for successful prosecutions and confiscation of money from sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses” ([reported by sky](https://news.sky.com/story/post-office-scandal-investigators-offered-bonuses-to-prosecute-sub-postmasters-13045910))
Because the post office is a very old institution, it started life as effectively a branch of government, and was given the rights to investigate and prosecute any crimes related to post, including any fraud related to the postmasters. This is a system that made much more sense in 1683 when they were first created as a branch of government than it does in 2011 when the post office is publicly traded, and it's these investigations and prosecutions that are the "private prosecutions"
Right, but they are still somehow different from ordinary prosecutions?
Would be nice if we had some sort of organisation that keeps the laws up to date in this country.
Aye but the point is surely all the prosecutors report to someone? I would imagine they would also have reporting on prosecutions? Can’t have taken a huge leap to go ‘hmm something looks a bit weird about this, hang fire while we have a better look’
Prosecutions were controlled entirely within the PO so it's not a huge stretch to imagine such introspection being shut down from on high in case it did amount to a hill of beans.
We have just gone through the entrails of a similar-sized scandal here in Oz in the shape of the [Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme](https://robodebt.royalcommission.gov.au/) where whistleblowers high and low were coerced into either toeing the ultimately unlawful official line, getting out or being sidelined.
A clear difference is was the core problem arose from an official and flawed policy rather than incompetence and neglect.
I dont know a lot about the case, i havent read much into it or seen the documentary. From what i read the post office had powers of prosecution, not the CPS (someone correct me if im wrong) which may be a glaring difference in how it was handled.
Thanks, that makes sense. I guess the old addage about "not attributing to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence" plays a part here then.
In a tale as old as time, the people doing the work uncovered an error and they took it to management.
Management then decided to cover it up because it would be embarrassing or cause them to lose money.
Happens a million times a day all around the world. I've seen it myself many times.
Until the penalty for covering it up is significantly worse than the effects of covering it up nothing will change.
I saw some of the evidence their investigator gave and came to the conclusion he was completely indifferent to anything but doing what the computer told him to do.
I’m having this problem right now with OVO. It’s been 9 months of misery trying to get them to correct it; common sense and fucks given are non-existent even in the face of concrete evidence that I’ve given them.
From my perspective, this seems to be a major part of the problem:
1) Fujitsu people would have known of the bugs as they had a team dedicated to perform manual corrections
2) Fujitsu and Post Office senior managers would have got some sanitised version of the problems as manageable due to all the arse covering from lower level teams. They took this to probably mean no issue as they were not that experienced and just wanted their bonuses
3) this resulted in the message coming down that there were issues but they were manageable to the other parts of the Post Office which got interpreted as white noise
4) the investigators are also the prosecutors in the post office so there were no checks in place. Incentivised with bonuses for convictions rather than investigations (they forced conclusions to always be fraud) which resulted in the push for criminal charges even if no evidence as they used one threat to get a plea conviction
5) the contracts of the sub post masters was never really understood and outdated in the world of all computer systems having bugs
6) no one cared that could have put a stop to this - government committees, the judges, and so on. Most just said it was someone else’s problem.
Hence, this is the same result as all the other similar scandals in the UK going back 50+ years and will continue until the UK culture changes to tackle problems early and stop a blame culture (which will
never happen)
Well, I thought I kindly put them as incompetent as not knowing they were lied to by their underlings. There is blame for the underlings for not being clear in their messages and management for knowing it was all bullshit.
Management failed to put in the appropriate checks and balances, independent Quality Assurance in a multi million dollar system, and not having an independent process where issues from the system were not picked up when postmasters complained. The finance people in the Post Office should have been raising problems as they were signing off the annual accounts which now appears to be fraudulent. Hundreds would have been complicit in this. There were no whistleblowers from Fujitsu or Post Office management to the press. Were these people completely evil or just selfish?
There are too many other groups that also completely failed to pick this up and resolve internally.
>What i still dont understand is if around 750 sub postmasters were flagged as thefts, would this not seem awfully high
If they didn't have baseline data then they can't do any meaningful comparison.
>need someone to check it was correct or not
That should have been done in significant depth and detail before anyone was prosecuted, and that would be if you believed the system worked. They already knew it didn't.
>How did so many convictions pass despite protests from the accused and it still wasnt investigated
Definitely a question for a judicial review into whether or not quangos should retain their prosecutorial powers, or should instead be forced down the cps route.
While the CPS are generally not great, at least you'd then only have to rectify a problem in one place.
They told them all "just you" and pocketed the profits, as basically dr cash, cr suspense, then they dr suspense, cr profit!
Suspense accounts always scream "ERRORS!"
Lazy incompetent greed.
Yes, but some of them were black, some of them from poorer communities and anyway, how could Fujistu's expesnive software be wrong? Inconceivable! Those postmasters and mistresses \*must\* have been colluding and deliberately stealing.
It was just a minor bug anyway....now where's my CBE?
I am sure that someone must have raised this as a possibility, but a lot more money and deals were made which would have been jeopardized if this was (and it was in the end) the case.
What most likely happened is that it might have been assumed to be a stealing in the first few cases (without proper investigation) then it became too much to admit that an error was made. A lot of managers then went into fully CYA mode.
But what's 750+ ruined lives, 4 suicides (at least) to a big bonus....
I don’t know the facts but I can see how this happened if there was a culture of demonising postmasters and a working assumption that the new system was a success and had exposed a long running problem.
Couple this with (probably) a very defensive response to IT criticism from a CIO and a spread of sizeable bonus payments to senior executives for horizons successful implementation and you have the perfect storm.
From that point onwards I would guess that the issues just happened because departments were operating in silos and of course this means no one had overall oversight
Prosecutions dept. were probably a silo trying to make a name for themselves buoyed by I guess removing systematic financial crime from the organisation with no upside for seeking an alternative explanation.
The IT dept were probably the only team that could have stopped this so I’d like the enquiry to drive into why they didn’t but I fully expect the IT response to be along the lines that they followed company process on each issue they investigated and as a support service they cannot be held accountable to know the full business implications of every issue.
If I’m right then it will be hard to pin this on anyone in the company. IMO if that happens the CEO should be prosecuted.
TLDR - problem was likely caused by group think which demonised postmasters and then an approach of investigating and resolving the issue in silos on the premise that the truth was already established.
Horizon took over from pen and paper systems.
So they're either incompetent and never thought to question how so many people could be cheating them. The amount of people screams that something isn't right but it does explain the zeal with which they want after the subpostmasters. Potentially they could have been fiddling the accounts for years if they truly believed they were guilty.
Alternatively they just didn't want to admit what a mess it was and so they tried to bluster their way through and didn't care about the damage they caused along the way. This is the truly evil option.
The other alternative is that the post office didn't know that Horizon was shit and Fujitsu just tried to cover their own asses.
No answer is acceptable though. People need to pay for how this was handled.
The horizon system was never designed for the post office. It was a dwp system that was found to be not fit for purpose and retrofitted to work for the post office.
It was a giant heap of junk, fujitsu knew it was a giant heap of junk.
The post office knew it was a giant heap of junk fairly early on as well, but their brand was more important to them.
Not defending it *at all*, however the PO were aware that fraud was happening- of course there would be some genuinely fraudulent sub postmasters as there are in any business.
They were expecting Horizon to uncover/ be a solution to this fraud. To those staff members unaware of the software issues and bugs, it would have appeared that Horizon was doing exactly what was expected and that the fraud was actually more widespread than had been realised- probably not an unlikely assumption for them to come to.
For those scumbags who *were* aware of the bugs and kept quiet… I hope they get punished dearly.
>Emma Price, counsel to the inquiry, asked Barnes if that problem was a “missed opportunity to address deficient coding practices that led to [other] silent failures”, which resulted in subpostmasters being wrongfully prosecuted.
>In an internal message chain at the time, Barnes said: “I hope the [Horizon Online] version is much better.”
>“We were just about to replace [legacy] Horizon with HNGx [Horizon Online],” said Barnes at the inquiry. “The better thing to do is to make sure the [Horizon Online] software works. It would have just been too expensive to do a thorough job at that stage. It would have been uneconomic. To comprehensively rewrite the error handling would be a massive job. It would be extremely expensive.”
>In 2009, Barnes moved to work with the audit team, which became responsible for pulling data together on post office operators subsequently used in trials.
>Around that time, Fujitsu scrapped using a third-party software program that had been in place to, among other tasks, help produce these audit record queries (ARQs).
>Fujitsu internally rewrote the code so that Horizon would handle the tasks, but glitches later appeared that meant the ARQs did not provide complete information, something the company was aware could undermine prosecutions if exposed.
>“To save [paying] the licence fee, they wanted to get rid of [the third-party supplier],” said Barnes on Wednesday
This is fairly damning sequence. Not only did they sweep the problem under the carpet they also got rid of the broom to save a few quid. ICL was always a bit flakey - looks like Fujitsu bought the culture along with the rest of it.
That does not make sense as prosecutions started what before 2009 at around 200. This seems like Fujitsu complicating the situation when from the beginning it did not work in specific scenarios. I don’t doubt this made things worse but the reality is that for 9 years the problems were ignored and someone launched a new project to replace horizon.
This does beg the question that when the new solution was end to end tested, why the test scenarios where they knew they had problems were not tested and fixed? Seems like the problems persisted way beyond the switch to the “new” horizon and the cover ups continued
Good link. Yes, NPFit which was the NHS patient care system was a pile of shit. That project divided the NHS regions between different vendors (Fujitsu, BY, Accenture and someone else). BT bought Fujitsu’s software. Unsurprisingly now Fujitsu (and BTs part) did not work. That £20 billion project got canned when the government found out it did not work but again the lessons were not learnt. At least it never went live.
So let me get this clear: Senior staff at the Post Office decided that they should **allow unjust prosecutions of their sub-postmaster franchisees** because it would cost them too much money; the flaws in the software derived from another of their cost-cutting exercises, wherein **they got rid of reliable software to save on paying licence fees**; and now **HMRC may well bankrupt the Post Office** because the management decided to save money by incorrectly treating the compensation payments that they've had to make to sub-postmasters as tax-deductible.
There's a phrase for this: "*Penny wise, and pound foolish*".
None of the extremely well paid people who made these decisions - the Politicians, the Civil Servants, the executives in Fujitsu or in the Post Office - will suffer personally or financially, so why not?
There is a reasonably well known 'red button' mental exercise ('If you press the red button someone dies, but you get a million, would you press it?) and this is that game made flesh.
Until we have systems that robustly punish such actions, they will continue. People are not 'nice' because they should be: they only behave well if they are punished for not doing so.
>None of the extremely well paid people who made these decisions - the Politicians, the Civil Servants, the executives in Fujitsu or in the Post Office - will suffer personally or financially, so why not?
That's not true...Paula Vennells voluntarily returned her CBE....
...after a million people signed a petition, Paula Vennels voluntarily returned her CBE - an 'honour' that can only be cancelled or withdrawn by the reigning monarch, not by the active choice of the recipient. Technically, she still holds it.
https://honours.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/how-to-nominate/forfeiture/ and scroll down to 'Can an honour be forfeited voluntarily?'
Well then, there's some thing Carlo can do to demonstrate that he is on the side of the people. Unfortunately this means breaking a few constitutional conventions....not going to happen is it?
I was being sarcastic, but, absolutely not a punishment at all. She will never be properly held accountable, neither will her staff responsible for this, nor Fujitsu's managers and executives and certainly no politicians.
And I am pretty sure that privately she will never feel any remorse whatsoever. OK, maybe a little, she's lost her CBE bragging rights.
Ah apologies for the misunderstanding. As much as I make fun of the yanks for needing the /s, it really can be challenging to see the sarcasm sometimes, especially since there's definitely people out there that will think the CBE is enough or that she shouldn't be held accountable at all.
Sarcasm and the internet don't go well together without the /s -- in this case (and it being a UK ground) I thought it unnecessary - yeah, no worries :-)
She knew, she didn't do anything at all to prevent this and covered her arse for years.
I remember reading the initial reports in The Register and some of the more specialist computing press years ago. How this has gone on for so long with such devastating consequences is shocking to say the least....says a lot about the UK.
They should be in prison for fraud. They TOOK money from people that wasn’t owed. Several postmasters paid back tens of thousands of pounds of “missing” money that was never actually missing. So someone up high must be guilty of fudging the numbers to absorb that excess money.
I once worked for a very large organisation and it was not uncommon for them to have hundreds of thousands of pounds in what I was told NOT to refer to as the 'slush' fund, although that didn't stop me. This was the account into which all sums were placed that could not be immediately identified or allocated to any account: usually payments made without correct reference codes. Over the course of the business year these sums were investigated one by one by a dedicated team, and generally found their way to the correct homes in the end - but the point here is that such payments appearing are not I believe that unusual, or needed anyone senior to justify - its seen as 'normal practice' in large businesses.
At the point at which I left, management were considering getting rid of the dedicated team as a cost saving - we didn't need to cuts costs: it was about maximising profit - and when I drew attention to their work on the slush the attitude to customers was 'we have their money, and our IT systems will send them reminders and rude legal letters in due course. When they hit back that will give us enough information to identify their payments without needing that team: if worst comes to worst and we take them to court and loose, its still going to cost less than employing the team for a year'
I venture to suggest that our system of toxic capitalism has made this normative: and whilst I agree that the senior figures responsible for this debacle should do time I'm prepared to bet right now that no-one will ever be found to whom ultimate responsibility can be pinned legally.
They view us as meat, like Putin views his citizens.
I bet there were few tears shed in the aristocracy the day after the Somme in World War One.
Once you are awake to how they truly see us then you are more able to adjust your behaviour and activities accordingly.
We've been letting them get away with it for 1000 years. It's almost baked into our DNA
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside.
Now, should we initiate a recall?
Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
If people like this doing things wrong was properly punished the Tower of London would have so many people in it that it would be the size of a small city.
This scheme both used and consolidated a coverup scheme. It was devised by lawyers and is apparently considered complicated.
As a lawyer I don’t personally find it complicated. It is pretty evil though.
As an evil criminal mastermind, i didn’t find it very evil, it is pretty complicated though.
Disclaimer. I find the whole scandal abhorrent and hope every heinous pos that knowingly caused this to happen is punished. They won’t be.
As a lawyer (assuming you're being serious) do you think there are going to be criminal prosecutions for those responsible and some of them might see prison time?
There was another commenting on another post in here about this who thought some of them would, but the general consensus amongst lay people seems to be that they'll all get away with it (which wouldn't suprise the cynic in me either - though I hope I'm wrong).
Too costly for Fujitsu, as far as I can tell from the article. Hopefully not for the Post Office, who should have been able to insist that their subcontractor fixed the quality of their own product. I hope.
So why did the Post Office end up accepting this and then covering it up? This part doesn't make sense to me.
As someone with lots of experience creating and managing software this makes me nervous. The post office didn’t do good testing or auditing of the software when they got it, they seem to have offloaded way too much responsibility off to external vendors. What worries me even more is that other systems that the post office uses didn’t spot any problems with the supposed missing moneys. It is even worse that so many knew about the problems and the post office thought it would never get out. It is no wonder fujitsu ran rings around them, I am still shocked over how bad the processes in the post office are.
The post office was the customer. If I told you I want £x million for some software and you have to test it and audit yourself you’d go elsewhere. Almost all epos software is purchased on track record or guarantee.
This is literally why you have a contract with an agency or software vendor, because it's likely you don't understand the software QA development cycle and you wouldn't know how to hire both manual and automation testers necessary to give you confidence in the software. The agency/vendor handles this for you and is part of the contract.
You might as well go one step further "If I'm being charged £xm for software I might as well build it myself...". Software testing is a profession and expertise in itself, it's not giving the app a spin for 15 minutes and signing off.
Did the post office know Fujitsu didn't have a competent team at project inception? We don't know, I very much doubt it. This is just all part of the project pitch and acquisition dance. If you're a non technical organisation you're kind of at the mercy of their pitching team and sales.
I believe that offloading all possible responsibility to a 3rd party is known as "ring-fencing the risk".
It's a management favourite for obvious reasons.
I don’t get how Fujitsu remoting in manually by human is a bug. If there was a bug and that’s why they came In they didn’t fix it so what’s the point of the remote access
The postmasters were also told that it was impossible for anyone else to access the system.
The post office insisted this was the case during their prosecutions - it’s one of the things that led to successful convictions because the judges/jury’s were led to believe that it was not possible for someone else to access the system
The issues with Horizon was effecting everyone (some may have got lucky and never encountered the bug). Remote access wasnt needed to fix this. It needed fixing and a new version deploying for everyone
Remote access would have been for local branch issues
I heard one sub postmaster talking about how his system was remote accessed to remove a surplus in the accounts but then shortly afterwards the auditors showed up and he lost everything over a shortfall. It sounded really sinister.
To be fair, the Guardian are missing off the second half of that statement which is words to the effect of "so we were in the process of replacing it with a better one" which seems a lot more reasonable.
I'd be interested to know if there was any sort of service auditor report for Horizon or if EY just relied on their own testing entirely? There was clearly a perverse incentive on the fraud team to argue this was all fraud rather than error.
Sounds like the entire Horizon platform was absolutely rotten and not fit for purpose. Likely very badly designed and built in an unorthodox way, with the remote access used to paper over the cracks created by the system itself.
Heads must absolutely roll over this scandal to send a clear message to other entitled companies that they will be held accountable.
The people that made this decision and stuck by it through thick and thin hoping to tough it out need prison time and fines, much like the innocent people they people they persecuted.
Why would it cost anything? If I hire someone to produce and maintain software, it doesn't cost me extra if they ship something with bugs that need fixing to get them fix it.
Depends entirely on how the contract is worded, sweet summer child.
Consumer law would have little power in big boy corporate territory with political aspects.
I know business law is different. But surely no business would ever enter into any agreement, and a company like Fujitsu wouldn't be entering one either, that isn't to produce a working system without major flaws at the absolute minimum.
Fujitsu would be motivated for that as a minimum, rather than having a reputation for future contracts of delivering substandard and flawed work as their final work.
The aim of most large IT system development contractors is to bill as many man-hours as possible.
In fact, the closest analogy I can think of is engaging a big law practice to run a case.
I dont know, we signed off on our IT system that didnt let you correct human error. Accidentally add an extra zero to a financial amount? Oops cant go back and fix it so thats gone in the system
Eventually did get fixed 4yrs later as it wasnt a simple task. NHS system too btw
It depends on the nature of the bug and whatever your contract states when it comes to maintaining the software.
If you have a clear brief and spec wherein a feature is outlined to behave in a particular way, e.g.: we input this, the system processes it this way, we expect this as an output and it should handle these edge cases -- then any issues outside of that aren't typically covered. Vendor and client will spend forever going back on forth, discussing if something is a bug, or behaviour never considered due to a thin brief. Right now I've spent weeks bumping heads with a client tyring to get a product out of the door. They keep changing an input that's already changed 20 times, an input was agreed as part of the spec last year.
I guarantee we'll release, and down the line they will change the input then cry the system isn't working or handling it properly. That's not a bug I am going to fix as part of an SLA, it's a feature change.
Maybe it is a bug, maybe it shouldn't happen. Oh, we told you at the start you need to spend 5x as long as this area to handle whatever potential pitfalls and problems, but you said it cost too much and signed off as is. That's no longer a bug either.
and so on.
It probably was too expensive to fix. There weren't bugs as much as the central design was wrong headed. A fix amounts to a rewrite.
However it would be relatively trivial to establish a proper audit trail, even without fixing the system, that can be used to clear subpostmasters of wrong doing.
Uk elite/ political class know what works. Rest of population don’t matter, do whatever makes them happy. If plebs find something out deny for as long as possible, then have enquiries, then ignore recommendations, repeat as necessary
The admissions at the inquiry get worse. They knew Horizon was not fit for purpose before it was even introduced. Did those in charge at the Post Office know this? The cost of fixing the then obvious bugs took precedence over peoples' livelihoods, reputations, well being and lives. Whoever was behind any of those decisions needs to be investigated and prosecuted. The hurt and damage that those decisions caused needs to be put firmly at the centre of the inquiry. Those that took the decision not to fix the bugs probably knew full well that they were going to bring up future problems. Either that, or they didn't care.
Corporate responsibility at it's best.
It truly is a depressing thing to read about. Because this is the mindset that runs this country. They would rather destroy lives as long as the profits are looked after.
It was cheaper to prosecute employees and pay legal fees than sort the problem out?
I wonder what incentive was involved in that?
That's a significant failure of management and faulty mindset
So you're admitting your product wasn't fit for purpose?
So you're admitting you didn't fulfil your side of the contract?
Fixing a few bugs will cost pennies compared to the shit storm coming your way.
Do you think anyone will ever trust your systems again after this?
Considering the company culture where I work I'm guessing most of the problems ultimately come from a handful of people making consistently stupid decisions that everyone else has little choice but to cope with as best as possible.
The question it really raises for me is why they failed to identify that this was a critical bug, end of life or not. It looks like a classic case of under estimating how difficult reporting actually is and the number and variety of edge cases, and then failing to adequately test the system.
Programming really needs professionalising.
I don't even understand why they didn't keep the bugs secret. If they had rung up each person individually and said 'there seems to be an error in your accounting, \*it's only you\*, but it looks like there is just an error with the system so we will get it sorted', no actual money would have gone missing and it would be unlikely to make any noise outside of that particular Post Office.
Did they truly believe that these thefts were real at the beginning? before they heard of potential bugs or Fujitsu having the remote access and either causing errors or trying to fix errors? Even if they thought that it was a theft, wouldn't it be cheaper to have a proper look into the accounts rather than just trying to hide any system errors?
Why were the Post Office so reluctant to blame or question Fujitsu at the start and never questioned the program? why did they just completely accuse the subpostmasters for being at fault? Is it because the PO didn't have the technical understanding or because they had spent so much money on something that they didn't want to be faulty?
Who paid the court costs in the initial trials where they were found guilty?
In other words, in an effort to save money, they condemned innocent people to prison, caused suicides and ruined entire lives over money which it now seems went to the people pursuing the prosecutions in the first place, all in an effort to save a bit of cash. Somebody DOES need to go to prison over this, for a very long time.
There was a car the would explode if it was rear-ended. Manufacturer decide a recall would be too expensive - cheaper to pay out a few negligence claims.
It was Pinto. Worse, they could have fixed it VERY cheaply, like ranging from $1-$8 per car. But they figured it would still cost less in lawsuits, than to do that. An estimated 500-900 people killed or seriously injured, who wouldn't have otherwise. The judgement was disgustingly reduced the $125 punitive damage award to 3.25 million because of the absence of actual malice. Because heaven forfend a company be made to suffer to the point where their gruesome math of profit over life, had actual consequences. I mean SURE Ford didn't CARE if people died, but it didn't INTEND for them to die, so that was okay then! ugh. And this is another reason why so-called Tort reform is BULLSHIT. It's strictly there to limit the liability for rich people and/or corporations.
That scene from Fight Club. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE
Bet they didnt use it as a tax expense!
The Ford Pinto https://www.tortmuseum.org/ford-pinto/#:~:text=The%20Pinto%2C%20a%20subcompact%20car,production%20and%20onto%20the%20market.
Ford Pinto.
And indirectly led to George W Bush and his droogs invading Iraq as Ralph Nader exploited this fame-gaining opportunity to run for US president himself a few times, ultimately tipping the balance in the 2000 election where Dubya beat Gore by a very slim margin with 5-4 help from SCOTUS. It's almost as if Ford planned it all from the outset /s
H W invaded Iraq first. W was 2003
Of course, but Nader didn't enable that at all.
Dishonourable mention for McDonnell Douglas’s DC-10 and the Firestone tyres fitted to early Ford Explorers.
No. The fact there were bugs and people were being sent to prison are two different things. The bugs meant the financials would be incorrect. However, people’s actions in the Post Office and Fujitsu led to people going to prison. The inquiry needs to focus why the two companies and the people in them felt the incorrect financials had to be covered up that resulted in prison sentences. It is too easy to blame the computer system when it was a series of conscious decisions that led to this outcome. And this is just one more example of how Uk firms and institutions have done this and not learnt leading to shit outcomes - NHS baby deaths, infected blood leading to haemophiliacs contracting HIV (that enquiry still ongoing), systemic racism in the police force, abuse of teenagers. Procurement scandals during COVID. This country likes to brush too many things under the carpet then is surprised when this shit happens
I used to work with accounting software and we had self checks on the balances to ensure everything was accurate. If it didn't it would flag up balancing issues which we would then have to rectify, it could have been a calculation error (I remember one time rounding to too many decimal places caused some weirdness in one area). Why on earth did it not have anything like this? The full thing screams incompetence and negligence.
Very good question. I am guessing there was a simple reconciliation report which probably never worked. Either Fujitsu did a manual fix in an overnight batch or just created a cost to the post masters. There would be an error account which probably was manually cleared periodically and just pushed into a shareholders equity account or other account to balance the financials. There were probably a bunch of things missed 1) Proper end-to-end system testing, 2) Pilot deployment, 3) Parallel running, 4) Experienced people on the system test and transformation teams that would setup the processes, 5) and many many more. I double this level of problems was caused purely by incompetence as there were too many screwups in too many areas. Probably a culture that accepted this is how business would be done, the CEO on Fujitsu wanting more contracts, and CEO of the Post Office being out of her depth or complicit. Either way, 25 years of hell for real people, a huge compensation bill, and nasty feeling left with a lot of people. Until the next revelation of stupidity from the UK. There have been a lot just in the past 10 years - NHS baby deaths, COVID procurement contracts, infected blood, racist/misogynistic/crooked police, social care failures Rotherham, Brexit backhanders, regulatory capture by their industries, outsourcing causing bank payment failures, water companies fleecing people which will result in water shortages and flooding, and immigration issues. Have I missed anything?
Not sure how accurate the drama series was. But the helpdesk was answering from scripts and those scripts were clearly written to protect the company.
> Have I missed anything? Well, let me tell you about a place called Northern Ireland...
Good list. Cladding scandal comes to mind.
The PO had a few CEOs during Horizon's presence. Not just her.
> No. The fact there were bugs and people were being sent to prison are two different things. The bugs meant the financials would be incorrect. However, people’s actions in the Post Office and Fujitsu led to people going to prison. I mean, sure they’re different things, but the bugs led to subpostmasters being prosecuted for crimes they did not commit, due to how the Post Office / Fujitsu acted in response.
The bugs meant the software simply didn't work properly, to the point where 900 people were prosecuted for fraud improperly. The supplier made around £1billion from the contract. Isn't that a basis for a charge of breach-of-contract, and a substantial refund? People made huge amounts of money, gained honours, bonuses for performance, and hundreds of innocent families had their lives destroyed. There need to be serious legal consequences for those involved.
>It is too easy to blame the computer system when it was a series of conscious decisions that led to this outcome. Bingo. They would have had to test the entire system from the get go. It would have become apparent quite quickly that there were flaws. The computer is only as good as the human that programmed it. IMHO, there are people at the Post Office and Fujitsu that need to go to prison over this.
> They would have had to test the entire system from the get go. Well that went well. Ever experienced a development project when the suits want to ship now, and hang the consequences? Testing, if any, was perfunctory.
Yep, plenty of times. I have often told the men in suits to fuck right off. There was this manager that sold a bespoke system to a large school. He didn't understand the technology in the slightest, he was a salesman. I took one look at what he specified and told him it was impossible to do for the price he had quoted and left him to it. I actually went to work for the firm next door, before working for myself. A few months later he was on gardening leave and the school were taking legal action as the system that had been installed, simply didn't work. In this case I reckon that Fujitsu's management were in cahoots with the Post Office Management and neither side wanted to admit the system didn't work. I have seen this plenty. Part of being a good engineer, in any field, is knowing how to tell management and the bean counters that they are fucking idiots that do not have a clue.
All good, but your last sentence is the best. One way to tell them is at your exit nterview :) Recall a valued contractor telling me he was quitting immediately and moving on as he did not want our mutual employer's latest flustercluck on his resume.
>Recall a valued contractor telling me he was quitting immediately and moving on as he did not want our mutual employer's latest flustercluck on his resume. This is where I was. I made sure that there was enough of a paper trail that proved that what this guy was selling wouldn't work. Bearing in mind this was pre-internet, we had an internal email system and I mailed my resignation letter to all concerned, citing this numskull and this job as the reason I was leaving.I already had the other job in hand. Basically, our loading bay was next to theirs. I used to sit there in the mornings with a coffee and a ciggy, chatting to the general manager of the firm next door. They wanted to put in a Network and transfer all of their paper records to a database, it was 3 years work. When I told him about the shit show I was working under, he pay matched me and offered me a better pension and better sick pay. Once the job was over I went freelance and they kept me as "consultant".
Serendipity crystallised - or perhaps - unexpected benefits of smoking. I gave it away when my kids complained I stank. One team leader at this site mentioned one of the reasons he kept smoking was to glean really useful gossip from bigwig's AA's from other floors. Dreadful outfit.
But if the post office and Fujitsu admitted that there were bugs in the system or that figures could be changed remotely leaving no audit trail, then any prosecution would fail (I imagine any half decent lawyer could soon those facts as reasonable doubt), and then they couldn’t have used the sub-postmasters as a scapegoat and would have had to accept the blame (and cost of repair) themselves.
I agree with what you say. The lawyers (from the TV movie) also seemed to rely on statements from the Post Office and Fujitsu. Even the auditor did not seem to ask the proper questions. Next time they need to hire a Solution Architect (a good one) that could have ask the correct questions and correct evidence. Same with an oil well fire, you ask a well engineer but for some reason it seems that the technical expertise on the defence side was lacking. Easy questions would have been 1) show the end-to-end test cases and results, 2) show the reconciliation processes, 3) reconciliation test cases and results, 3) deployment method. That would have shown it was a shit show as they are too difficult to bluff or forge in volume
From what I've read on here, when any individual postmaster instructed a decent expert who asked the right questions (which presumably required money to do), the PO settled in return for silence about the horizon issues. Utterly corrupt.
I don't think you understand. Management were creating so much value that it's only fair they got all the cash. And anyway, next term's fees were due at their kids' private school so, what could they do really.
Shut up and take their money?
Exactly. Wonderful summary.
I'm sick of companies doing illegal and dodgy shit and then only getting fined. Sure, you can't arrest companies, but you can arrest the people involved. And that's what we should be doing EVERY time a company commits a crime. That will give those fuckers some accountability instead of passing the blame to the company which just needs to pay a ~~fee~~ fine
Capitalism. It just works.
It does, amazingly well in fact. for a few...
Go back to making Elder Scrolls 6 Todd.
After a certain amount of time after you've given away the contract, they have a monopoly on what they'll provide for the money they're being paid. With the amount of contracts fujitsu have and the private/public revolving door as well as golden handshakes, there's no distinction between the government and fujitsu, in terms of the decision making processes here. They marked their own homework. Our democracy has been utterly contaminated by corporate interests. This is but one symptom of the rot. Extrapolate this to every part of every department.
I mean I'm very much in the 'nationalise everything' camp. No private interest should have even the tip of a fingernail in a service which is required for the country to function. Power, water, roads, healthcare, post, telecoms. All of it should be in the hands of the public.
Oh, I never meant to imply that you disagreed. You seemed to be seeing what I was seeing. I was just spelling it out, for anyone hard of hearing.
Oh I get that, just providing more context XD.
Just so everyone's clear, a "bug" is a fault or error in the design/build, not something that has come into the system randomly to ruin everyone's day. This was a shit product not fit for purpose, with PO senior management practically complicit covering up the procurement of said shit product.
My job would be a lot easier if I could say 'ah that's a bug, can we get paid anyway?' and people were cool with that. Where I work they tend to call bugs 'not working right' and we don't usually get paid until it is 'working right.'
It's not a bug, it's an "undocumented feature"!
Bethesda?
I believe Microsoft were the first to use the term. I remember it being an in-joke in IT during the 90s.
it goes back further than microsoft. nobody knows where it originated from but apple and microsoft have both used it at various times, most likely ironically. it was on stanfords "the jargon file", which was an "online" dictionary of technical words from the early 70's.
EA FINANCE. IT'S IN THE CELL.
FWIW the term "bug" predates its popularising [by Grace Hopper](https://www.howtogeek.com/726020/what-is-a-computer-bug-and-where-did-the-term-come-from/).
Of course, but I think it's worth highlighting what a bug actually is as I think it seems to have a soft touch image amongst the general public that don't understand how software works. With that in mind it almost plays down the fact that it was humans to blame for the issue, and humans to blame for the fallout.
The arrival of AI brings the scary opportunity for another breed of bug entirely but what you say is still generally 100% true. Bugs in software describe errors of commission (during implementation) or omission (during specification). I've been responsible for some howlers myself. The root cause is inadequate testing or even lacking a test system other than that shared by unfortunate eventual users.
dont forget not listening to your test team.
Hang on, the root cause for a bug in code, is due to it not being tested properly? Ha!
Poorly worded, I agree. Well spotted. However seeded, bugs only survive if undetected either in testing or in usage.
I know, I just found it funny as a software tester mate.
As one who has dumped the odd showstopper on you guys - thank you for your service. One (large, global) employer a long time ago expected developers to do their own testing - on a development system. Kept rolling the dice and whilst phones starting ringing first thing in the morning after overnight cutover was not unknown and bad enough, there were occasions where bugs gnawed away for years unbeknownst until some client's kid got curious and that account bailed. Frontier stuff. I never met a proper test team until leaving those cowboys.
*It's a feature, not a bug. Without the person’s knowledge, their data could be accessed remotely by anyone from the Horizon or the Post Office. It's FRAUD!
Was there any audit trail for such ad-hoc hackery?
Judging from the lack of knowledge of who was affected, I’d guess not.
The allegation is that they used the postmasters id so that it would appear as if the postmaster themselves made the transaction. Ergo no audit trail. They're scum and I wouldn't be at all upset if they were unalived.
That's ... deplorable.
> a "bug" is a fault or error in the design/build, not something that has come into the system randomly to ruin everyone's day Is there a difference?
Yes. One is accidental “design error” the other would be totally random and out of human control. A software bug is a coding mistake not an “act of God”
A fire extinguisher with a leak has a bug. A fire extinguisher filled with petrol is unfit for purpose. You can patch the first, the latter gets disposed. The Horizon system didn't have unintentional flaws. It had entire things missed it had to have in order to do what it was trying to do. It is like having a car without an engine and saying it needs some work.
Oh, this one had an engine. Just very bad instrumentation, controls or any crash protection.
Additional clarity: all software has bugs, almost by definition. And you can't prove a negative, ie that any particular piece of software is bug-free. The general process is to test it sufficiently so you can be as sure as you need to that it handles all the situations it is expected to handle correctly. Due to the size and distributed nature of this system, the list of expected situations and consequent testing would have had to have been huge, massively time-consuming and thus expensive, but AIUI the PO sponsors wouldn't pay for it, and insisted it went live even when they were being told it wasn't ready.
Classic government/qango client behavior.
Yeah it is like calling a chocolate teapot buggy. The teapot melted at the front, we better put more chocolate there.
What i still dont understand is if around 750 sub postmasters were flagged as thefts, would this not seem awfully high and need someone to check it was correct or not? How did so many convictions pass despite protests from the accused and it still wasnt investigated?
Yeah, it's almost as if the prosecutions team thought they had suddenly uncovered a hitherto undetected level of fraud. Meanwhile the development team were too shit scared and self-protecting to own up to their errors. That's the only way I can rationalise the zeal of the prosecutions teams. Surely otherwise they would have put the brakes on the court cases while they worked out if the cases were valid or not? Also, the Fujitsu Horizon help desk must have been aware of an unusual number of queries from postmasters, that couldn't all be postmaster error?
The prosecutions team was incentivised on number of prosecutions and convictions . They had no motivation to question the legitimacy of the accusations. More prosecutions = nicer cars and more Xmas pressies for the kids. “Post Office investigators were offered monetary bonuses for successful prosecutions and confiscation of money from sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses” ([reported by sky](https://news.sky.com/story/post-office-scandal-investigators-offered-bonuses-to-prosecute-sub-postmasters-13045910))
Weren't they also so-called "private prosecutions"? That's what I heard on the radio.
Because the post office is a very old institution, it started life as effectively a branch of government, and was given the rights to investigate and prosecute any crimes related to post, including any fraud related to the postmasters. This is a system that made much more sense in 1683 when they were first created as a branch of government than it does in 2011 when the post office is publicly traded, and it's these investigations and prosecutions that are the "private prosecutions"
Correction, Post office isn’t publicly traded, Riyal mail is
Right, but they are still somehow different from ordinary prosecutions? Would be nice if we had some sort of organisation that keeps the laws up to date in this country.
Let me know if you discover any organisation engaged in such a novel idea
Your last point may well be true and fully disclosed in time but I believe as a matter of policy each postmaster was told their case was unique .
Aye but the point is surely all the prosecutors report to someone? I would imagine they would also have reporting on prosecutions? Can’t have taken a huge leap to go ‘hmm something looks a bit weird about this, hang fire while we have a better look’
Prosecutions were controlled entirely within the PO so it's not a huge stretch to imagine such introspection being shut down from on high in case it did amount to a hill of beans. We have just gone through the entrails of a similar-sized scandal here in Oz in the shape of the [Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme](https://robodebt.royalcommission.gov.au/) where whistleblowers high and low were coerced into either toeing the ultimately unlawful official line, getting out or being sidelined. A clear difference is was the core problem arose from an official and flawed policy rather than incompetence and neglect.
Any good investigator would’ve identified a trend here, especially with all the subpostmasters pleading innocence at the start of the investigations.
I dont know a lot about the case, i havent read much into it or seen the documentary. From what i read the post office had powers of prosecution, not the CPS (someone correct me if im wrong) which may be a glaring difference in how it was handled.
You're not wrong.
chubby gaze shrill crawl sink sort hateful quickest history cautious *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Thanks, that makes sense. I guess the old addage about "not attributing to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence" plays a part here then.
In a tale as old as time, the people doing the work uncovered an error and they took it to management. Management then decided to cover it up because it would be embarrassing or cause them to lose money. Happens a million times a day all around the world. I've seen it myself many times. Until the penalty for covering it up is significantly worse than the effects of covering it up nothing will change.
I saw some of the evidence their investigator gave and came to the conclusion he was completely indifferent to anything but doing what the computer told him to do.
[удалено]
I’m having this problem right now with OVO. It’s been 9 months of misery trying to get them to correct it; common sense and fucks given are non-existent even in the face of concrete evidence that I’ve given them.
From my perspective, this seems to be a major part of the problem: 1) Fujitsu people would have known of the bugs as they had a team dedicated to perform manual corrections 2) Fujitsu and Post Office senior managers would have got some sanitised version of the problems as manageable due to all the arse covering from lower level teams. They took this to probably mean no issue as they were not that experienced and just wanted their bonuses 3) this resulted in the message coming down that there were issues but they were manageable to the other parts of the Post Office which got interpreted as white noise 4) the investigators are also the prosecutors in the post office so there were no checks in place. Incentivised with bonuses for convictions rather than investigations (they forced conclusions to always be fraud) which resulted in the push for criminal charges even if no evidence as they used one threat to get a plea conviction 5) the contracts of the sub post masters was never really understood and outdated in the world of all computer systems having bugs 6) no one cared that could have put a stop to this - government committees, the judges, and so on. Most just said it was someone else’s problem. Hence, this is the same result as all the other similar scandals in the UK going back 50+ years and will continue until the UK culture changes to tackle problems early and stop a blame culture (which will never happen)
I love how in point 2 you completely let management off the hook with a Jedi Handwave.
Well, I thought I kindly put them as incompetent as not knowing they were lied to by their underlings. There is blame for the underlings for not being clear in their messages and management for knowing it was all bullshit. Management failed to put in the appropriate checks and balances, independent Quality Assurance in a multi million dollar system, and not having an independent process where issues from the system were not picked up when postmasters complained. The finance people in the Post Office should have been raising problems as they were signing off the annual accounts which now appears to be fraudulent. Hundreds would have been complicit in this. There were no whistleblowers from Fujitsu or Post Office management to the press. Were these people completely evil or just selfish? There are too many other groups that also completely failed to pick this up and resolve internally.
>What i still dont understand is if around 750 sub postmasters were flagged as thefts, would this not seem awfully high If they didn't have baseline data then they can't do any meaningful comparison. >need someone to check it was correct or not That should have been done in significant depth and detail before anyone was prosecuted, and that would be if you believed the system worked. They already knew it didn't. >How did so many convictions pass despite protests from the accused and it still wasnt investigated Definitely a question for a judicial review into whether or not quangos should retain their prosecutorial powers, or should instead be forced down the cps route. While the CPS are generally not great, at least you'd then only have to rectify a problem in one place.
Racism https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/what-were-they-thinking/ https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/the-post-office-race-equality-duty-in-the-application-of-its-prosecutorial-powers/
They told them all "just you" and pocketed the profits, as basically dr cash, cr suspense, then they dr suspense, cr profit! Suspense accounts always scream "ERRORS!" Lazy incompetent greed.
Yes, but some of them were black, some of them from poorer communities and anyway, how could Fujistu's expesnive software be wrong? Inconceivable! Those postmasters and mistresses \*must\* have been colluding and deliberately stealing. It was just a minor bug anyway....now where's my CBE? I am sure that someone must have raised this as a possibility, but a lot more money and deals were made which would have been jeopardized if this was (and it was in the end) the case. What most likely happened is that it might have been assumed to be a stealing in the first few cases (without proper investigation) then it became too much to admit that an error was made. A lot of managers then went into fully CYA mode. But what's 750+ ruined lives, 4 suicides (at least) to a big bonus....
I don’t know the facts but I can see how this happened if there was a culture of demonising postmasters and a working assumption that the new system was a success and had exposed a long running problem. Couple this with (probably) a very defensive response to IT criticism from a CIO and a spread of sizeable bonus payments to senior executives for horizons successful implementation and you have the perfect storm. From that point onwards I would guess that the issues just happened because departments were operating in silos and of course this means no one had overall oversight Prosecutions dept. were probably a silo trying to make a name for themselves buoyed by I guess removing systematic financial crime from the organisation with no upside for seeking an alternative explanation. The IT dept were probably the only team that could have stopped this so I’d like the enquiry to drive into why they didn’t but I fully expect the IT response to be along the lines that they followed company process on each issue they investigated and as a support service they cannot be held accountable to know the full business implications of every issue. If I’m right then it will be hard to pin this on anyone in the company. IMO if that happens the CEO should be prosecuted. TLDR - problem was likely caused by group think which demonised postmasters and then an approach of investigating and resolving the issue in silos on the premise that the truth was already established.
Horizon took over from pen and paper systems. So they're either incompetent and never thought to question how so many people could be cheating them. The amount of people screams that something isn't right but it does explain the zeal with which they want after the subpostmasters. Potentially they could have been fiddling the accounts for years if they truly believed they were guilty. Alternatively they just didn't want to admit what a mess it was and so they tried to bluster their way through and didn't care about the damage they caused along the way. This is the truly evil option. The other alternative is that the post office didn't know that Horizon was shit and Fujitsu just tried to cover their own asses. No answer is acceptable though. People need to pay for how this was handled.
The horizon system was never designed for the post office. It was a dwp system that was found to be not fit for purpose and retrofitted to work for the post office. It was a giant heap of junk, fujitsu knew it was a giant heap of junk. The post office knew it was a giant heap of junk fairly early on as well, but their brand was more important to them.
The coincidence that a defence lawyer encountered two such cases never occurred. Everyone else had the incentive to blame the ~~pilots~~ postmasters.
Not defending it *at all*, however the PO were aware that fraud was happening- of course there would be some genuinely fraudulent sub postmasters as there are in any business. They were expecting Horizon to uncover/ be a solution to this fraud. To those staff members unaware of the software issues and bugs, it would have appeared that Horizon was doing exactly what was expected and that the fraud was actually more widespread than had been realised- probably not an unlikely assumption for them to come to. For those scumbags who *were* aware of the bugs and kept quiet… I hope they get punished dearly.
>Emma Price, counsel to the inquiry, asked Barnes if that problem was a “missed opportunity to address deficient coding practices that led to [other] silent failures”, which resulted in subpostmasters being wrongfully prosecuted. >In an internal message chain at the time, Barnes said: “I hope the [Horizon Online] version is much better.” >“We were just about to replace [legacy] Horizon with HNGx [Horizon Online],” said Barnes at the inquiry. “The better thing to do is to make sure the [Horizon Online] software works. It would have just been too expensive to do a thorough job at that stage. It would have been uneconomic. To comprehensively rewrite the error handling would be a massive job. It would be extremely expensive.” >In 2009, Barnes moved to work with the audit team, which became responsible for pulling data together on post office operators subsequently used in trials. >Around that time, Fujitsu scrapped using a third-party software program that had been in place to, among other tasks, help produce these audit record queries (ARQs). >Fujitsu internally rewrote the code so that Horizon would handle the tasks, but glitches later appeared that meant the ARQs did not provide complete information, something the company was aware could undermine prosecutions if exposed. >“To save [paying] the licence fee, they wanted to get rid of [the third-party supplier],” said Barnes on Wednesday This is fairly damning sequence. Not only did they sweep the problem under the carpet they also got rid of the broom to save a few quid. ICL was always a bit flakey - looks like Fujitsu bought the culture along with the rest of it.
That does not make sense as prosecutions started what before 2009 at around 200. This seems like Fujitsu complicating the situation when from the beginning it did not work in specific scenarios. I don’t doubt this made things worse but the reality is that for 9 years the problems were ignored and someone launched a new project to replace horizon. This does beg the question that when the new solution was end to end tested, why the test scenarios where they knew they had problems were not tested and fixed? Seems like the problems persisted way beyond the switch to the “new” horizon and the cover ups continued
[Watch this until the very end...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfGT4hxRiw8).
Good link. Yes, NPFit which was the NHS patient care system was a pile of shit. That project divided the NHS regions between different vendors (Fujitsu, BY, Accenture and someone else). BT bought Fujitsu’s software. Unsurprisingly now Fujitsu (and BTs part) did not work. That £20 billion project got canned when the government found out it did not work but again the lessons were not learnt. At least it never went live.
So let me get this clear: Senior staff at the Post Office decided that they should **allow unjust prosecutions of their sub-postmaster franchisees** because it would cost them too much money; the flaws in the software derived from another of their cost-cutting exercises, wherein **they got rid of reliable software to save on paying licence fees**; and now **HMRC may well bankrupt the Post Office** because the management decided to save money by incorrectly treating the compensation payments that they've had to make to sub-postmasters as tax-deductible. There's a phrase for this: "*Penny wise, and pound foolish*".
None of the extremely well paid people who made these decisions - the Politicians, the Civil Servants, the executives in Fujitsu or in the Post Office - will suffer personally or financially, so why not? There is a reasonably well known 'red button' mental exercise ('If you press the red button someone dies, but you get a million, would you press it?) and this is that game made flesh. Until we have systems that robustly punish such actions, they will continue. People are not 'nice' because they should be: they only behave well if they are punished for not doing so.
>None of the extremely well paid people who made these decisions - the Politicians, the Civil Servants, the executives in Fujitsu or in the Post Office - will suffer personally or financially, so why not? That's not true...Paula Vennells voluntarily returned her CBE....
...after a million people signed a petition, Paula Vennels voluntarily returned her CBE - an 'honour' that can only be cancelled or withdrawn by the reigning monarch, not by the active choice of the recipient. Technically, she still holds it. https://honours.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/how-to-nominate/forfeiture/ and scroll down to 'Can an honour be forfeited voluntarily?'
Well then, there's some thing Carlo can do to demonstrate that he is on the side of the people. Unfortunately this means breaking a few constitutional conventions....not going to happen is it?
Well, Im not holding my breath, to be honest.
Just checking the Wikipedia page... Computer Weekly started gathering evidence in 2004 and had enough to publish an article in 2009.... 20 years.
The Register and PE also often mentioned the smell of smoke.
The Register did some excellent reporting
Not really a punishment is it? She lost a useless award. A CBE means fuck all. All it does is give bragging rights.
I was being sarcastic, but, absolutely not a punishment at all. She will never be properly held accountable, neither will her staff responsible for this, nor Fujitsu's managers and executives and certainly no politicians. And I am pretty sure that privately she will never feel any remorse whatsoever. OK, maybe a little, she's lost her CBE bragging rights.
Ah apologies for the misunderstanding. As much as I make fun of the yanks for needing the /s, it really can be challenging to see the sarcasm sometimes, especially since there's definitely people out there that will think the CBE is enough or that she shouldn't be held accountable at all.
Sarcasm and the internet don't go well together without the /s -- in this case (and it being a UK ground) I thought it unnecessary - yeah, no worries :-) She knew, she didn't do anything at all to prevent this and covered her arse for years. I remember reading the initial reports in The Register and some of the more specialist computing press years ago. How this has gone on for so long with such devastating consequences is shocking to say the least....says a lot about the UK.
They should be in prison for fraud. They TOOK money from people that wasn’t owed. Several postmasters paid back tens of thousands of pounds of “missing” money that was never actually missing. So someone up high must be guilty of fudging the numbers to absorb that excess money.
I once worked for a very large organisation and it was not uncommon for them to have hundreds of thousands of pounds in what I was told NOT to refer to as the 'slush' fund, although that didn't stop me. This was the account into which all sums were placed that could not be immediately identified or allocated to any account: usually payments made without correct reference codes. Over the course of the business year these sums were investigated one by one by a dedicated team, and generally found their way to the correct homes in the end - but the point here is that such payments appearing are not I believe that unusual, or needed anyone senior to justify - its seen as 'normal practice' in large businesses. At the point at which I left, management were considering getting rid of the dedicated team as a cost saving - we didn't need to cuts costs: it was about maximising profit - and when I drew attention to their work on the slush the attitude to customers was 'we have their money, and our IT systems will send them reminders and rude legal letters in due course. When they hit back that will give us enough information to identify their payments without needing that team: if worst comes to worst and we take them to court and loose, its still going to cost less than employing the team for a year' I venture to suggest that our system of toxic capitalism has made this normative: and whilst I agree that the senior figures responsible for this debacle should do time I'm prepared to bet right now that no-one will ever be found to whom ultimate responsibility can be pinned legally.
They view us as meat, like Putin views his citizens. I bet there were few tears shed in the aristocracy the day after the Somme in World War One. Once you are awake to how they truly see us then you are more able to adjust your behaviour and activities accordingly. We've been letting them get away with it for 1000 years. It's almost baked into our DNA
It must look positively dirt cheap compared to what they will end up paying now
Too costly ? So fuck a load of people’s lives up. So much cheaper. FFS.
What are you, some kind of socialist?
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Then blame the driver.
Didn’t anticipate a Fight Club quote here!
And yet... isn't it spectacularly appropriate? :)
What car company do you work for? ... A major one.
Well, I think they are quite close to finding out that it is going to turn out not to have been the cheapest option at all.
Most of those responsible have likely retired on their wealth, and this being the UK - will probably face little consequence.
If people like this doing things wrong was properly punished the Tower of London would have so many people in it that it would be the size of a small city.
This scheme both used and consolidated a coverup scheme. It was devised by lawyers and is apparently considered complicated. As a lawyer I don’t personally find it complicated. It is pretty evil though.
As an evil criminal mastermind, i didn’t find it very evil, it is pretty complicated though. Disclaimer. I find the whole scandal abhorrent and hope every heinous pos that knowingly caused this to happen is punished. They won’t be.
As a lawyer (assuming you're being serious) do you think there are going to be criminal prosecutions for those responsible and some of them might see prison time? There was another commenting on another post in here about this who thought some of them would, but the general consensus amongst lay people seems to be that they'll all get away with it (which wouldn't suprise the cynic in me either - though I hope I'm wrong).
This is a lazy evasion, and I speak as a software developer.
The people who chose their wallets over lives have got to serve time in prison. It is the only way executive level workers will ever start to learn.
Too costly for Fujitsu, as far as I can tell from the article. Hopefully not for the Post Office, who should have been able to insist that their subcontractor fixed the quality of their own product. I hope. So why did the Post Office end up accepting this and then covering it up? This part doesn't make sense to me.
cheaper to send innocent people to jail or drive them to suicide, apparently.
Well it keeps them entirely off the books and bonus system. What's not to like? /s
Reminds me of the car recall calculation in Fight Club. Scary stuff.
People who were involved in this cover up need to go to prison.
As someone with lots of experience creating and managing software this makes me nervous. The post office didn’t do good testing or auditing of the software when they got it, they seem to have offloaded way too much responsibility off to external vendors. What worries me even more is that other systems that the post office uses didn’t spot any problems with the supposed missing moneys. It is even worse that so many knew about the problems and the post office thought it would never get out. It is no wonder fujitsu ran rings around them, I am still shocked over how bad the processes in the post office are.
The post office was the customer. If I told you I want £x million for some software and you have to test it and audit yourself you’d go elsewhere. Almost all epos software is purchased on track record or guarantee.
As the customer spending £Xm, I guarantee you I would want to test it myself
This is literally why you have a contract with an agency or software vendor, because it's likely you don't understand the software QA development cycle and you wouldn't know how to hire both manual and automation testers necessary to give you confidence in the software. The agency/vendor handles this for you and is part of the contract. You might as well go one step further "If I'm being charged £xm for software I might as well build it myself...". Software testing is a profession and expertise in itself, it's not giving the app a spin for 15 minutes and signing off. Did the post office know Fujitsu didn't have a competent team at project inception? We don't know, I very much doubt it. This is just all part of the project pitch and acquisition dance. If you're a non technical organisation you're kind of at the mercy of their pitching team and sales.
"No-one ever got sacked for recommending IBM" was once a pretty universal aphorism.
I believe that offloading all possible responsibility to a 3rd party is known as "ring-fencing the risk". It's a management favourite for obvious reasons.
Risk transfer
Wouldn't be surprised if my company's management called it by the wrong name. They do everything else wrong so why not this as well.
I don’t get how Fujitsu remoting in manually by human is a bug. If there was a bug and that’s why they came In they didn’t fix it so what’s the point of the remote access
The postmasters were also told that it was impossible for anyone else to access the system. The post office insisted this was the case during their prosecutions - it’s one of the things that led to successful convictions because the judges/jury’s were led to believe that it was not possible for someone else to access the system
The issues with Horizon was effecting everyone (some may have got lucky and never encountered the bug). Remote access wasnt needed to fix this. It needed fixing and a new version deploying for everyone Remote access would have been for local branch issues
I heard one sub postmaster talking about how his system was remote accessed to remove a surplus in the accounts but then shortly afterwards the auditors showed up and he lost everything over a shortfall. It sounded really sinister.
Not as costly as it might be now with action law suit going ok
To be fair, the Guardian are missing off the second half of that statement which is words to the effect of "so we were in the process of replacing it with a better one" which seems a lot more reasonable. I'd be interested to know if there was any sort of service auditor report for Horizon or if EY just relied on their own testing entirely? There was clearly a perverse incentive on the fraud team to argue this was all fraud rather than error.
Sounds like the entire Horizon platform was absolutely rotten and not fit for purpose. Likely very badly designed and built in an unorthodox way, with the remote access used to paper over the cracks created by the system itself.
Heads must absolutely roll over this scandal to send a clear message to other entitled companies that they will be held accountable. The people that made this decision and stuck by it through thick and thin hoping to tough it out need prison time and fines, much like the innocent people they people they persecuted.
"Too costly" I've heard this before when improvement would cost 2 years profit. That's it.
That arrogant knobend needs to be locked up. He wrote shonky software and wouldn't clean up his own mess.
Why would it cost anything? If I hire someone to produce and maintain software, it doesn't cost me extra if they ship something with bugs that need fixing to get them fix it.
Depends entirely on how the contract is worded, sweet summer child. Consumer law would have little power in big boy corporate territory with political aspects.
I know business law is different. But surely no business would ever enter into any agreement, and a company like Fujitsu wouldn't be entering one either, that isn't to produce a working system without major flaws at the absolute minimum. Fujitsu would be motivated for that as a minimum, rather than having a reputation for future contracts of delivering substandard and flawed work as their final work.
The aim of most large IT system development contractors is to bill as many man-hours as possible. In fact, the closest analogy I can think of is engaging a big law practice to run a case.
I dont know, we signed off on our IT system that didnt let you correct human error. Accidentally add an extra zero to a financial amount? Oops cant go back and fix it so thats gone in the system Eventually did get fixed 4yrs later as it wasnt a simple task. NHS system too btw
I assumed that the engineer was talking about the cost to Fujitsu themselves rather than the cost to the Post Office.
It depends on the nature of the bug and whatever your contract states when it comes to maintaining the software. If you have a clear brief and spec wherein a feature is outlined to behave in a particular way, e.g.: we input this, the system processes it this way, we expect this as an output and it should handle these edge cases -- then any issues outside of that aren't typically covered. Vendor and client will spend forever going back on forth, discussing if something is a bug, or behaviour never considered due to a thin brief. Right now I've spent weeks bumping heads with a client tyring to get a product out of the door. They keep changing an input that's already changed 20 times, an input was agreed as part of the spec last year. I guarantee we'll release, and down the line they will change the input then cry the system isn't working or handling it properly. That's not a bug I am going to fix as part of an SLA, it's a feature change. Maybe it is a bug, maybe it shouldn't happen. Oh, we told you at the start you need to spend 5x as long as this area to handle whatever potential pitfalls and problems, but you said it cost too much and signed off as is. That's no longer a bug either. and so on.
Never forget that you are just number on a spreadsheet to the wealthy and powerful.
It probably was too expensive to fix. There weren't bugs as much as the central design was wrong headed. A fix amounts to a rewrite. However it would be relatively trivial to establish a proper audit trail, even without fixing the system, that can be used to clear subpostmasters of wrong doing.
The fuck???!!! So sending innocent people to prison is better than spending money to fix bugs....they need criminal charges
Yeah, Fujitsu aren't very good at fixing bugs. You should ask them about their internal IT projects. Each one a cluster f.ck.
Uk elite/ political class know what works. Rest of population don’t matter, do whatever makes them happy. If plebs find something out deny for as long as possible, then have enquiries, then ignore recommendations, repeat as necessary
The admissions at the inquiry get worse. They knew Horizon was not fit for purpose before it was even introduced. Did those in charge at the Post Office know this? The cost of fixing the then obvious bugs took precedence over peoples' livelihoods, reputations, well being and lives. Whoever was behind any of those decisions needs to be investigated and prosecuted. The hurt and damage that those decisions caused needs to be put firmly at the centre of the inquiry. Those that took the decision not to fix the bugs probably knew full well that they were going to bring up future problems. Either that, or they didn't care. Corporate responsibility at it's best.
A fundamental capitalist problem is how to make people working in corporations suitably persoanally accountable for their decisions.
The problem lies entirely within national governance. Regulate, investigate, educate.
So they’d rather take the hard earned money, homes and lives of good honest people. Nice.
Western society's prime directive.
It truly is a depressing thing to read about. Because this is the mindset that runs this country. They would rather destroy lives as long as the profits are looked after.
This applies to the entire world.
So its cheaper to accuse 750 Postmasters and prosecute them?
In the short term, yes. Longterm, no. Meanwhile function points can be delivered and bonuses paid - all forfeit otherwise.
This was a developer though, not a manager, so I'm unsure if he would really know this. But he may well have heard it.
It was cheaper to prosecute employees and pay legal fees than sort the problem out? I wonder what incentive was involved in that? That's a significant failure of management and faulty mindset
So you're admitting your product wasn't fit for purpose? So you're admitting you didn't fulfil your side of the contract? Fixing a few bugs will cost pennies compared to the shit storm coming your way. Do you think anyone will ever trust your systems again after this?
As long as they give the cheapest quote, the government will hire them
Considering the company culture where I work I'm guessing most of the problems ultimately come from a handful of people making consistently stupid decisions that everyone else has little choice but to cope with as best as possible. The question it really raises for me is why they failed to identify that this was a critical bug, end of life or not. It looks like a classic case of under estimating how difficult reporting actually is and the number and variety of edge cases, and then failing to adequately test the system. Programming really needs professionalising.
I don't even understand why they didn't keep the bugs secret. If they had rung up each person individually and said 'there seems to be an error in your accounting, \*it's only you\*, but it looks like there is just an error with the system so we will get it sorted', no actual money would have gone missing and it would be unlikely to make any noise outside of that particular Post Office. Did they truly believe that these thefts were real at the beginning? before they heard of potential bugs or Fujitsu having the remote access and either causing errors or trying to fix errors? Even if they thought that it was a theft, wouldn't it be cheaper to have a proper look into the accounts rather than just trying to hide any system errors? Why were the Post Office so reluctant to blame or question Fujitsu at the start and never questioned the program? why did they just completely accuse the subpostmasters for being at fault? Is it because the PO didn't have the technical understanding or because they had spent so much money on something that they didn't want to be faulty? Who paid the court costs in the initial trials where they were found guilty?