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Post Office scandal: Public inquiry to examine wrongful convictions

271 points by nickdothutton 5y ago

smsm42 5y ago
I don't know how the ridiculous idea that a result of a computer program can be implicitly trusted got into the minds of people, but we better get it out sooner rather than later. Convictions based only on evidence provided by software - without other supporting evidence or a formal proof of software correctness (that doesn't exist for pretty much any commonly used software) should not be a thing. It's a shame that the judiciary seems to be bedazzled by the new shiny toys and fail to recognize how flawed they are in reality.
raxxorrax 5y ago
This should induce criminal charges not against the software developer, it should induce charges against management and those that believed the data is enough for a conviction. Difficult case because that would also implicate judges and public prosecutors. Of course that will not happen, but they are guilty far more than Fujitsu. A software error needs to be calculated for. This is technical reality that cannot be changed as of today. Of course that also implicates other industries like banking. I don't think the UK government has enough money to compensate the people it wrongfully convicted. It is harrowing mismanagement that the software wasn't tested immediately before any conviction. Everyone failed here aside from the postmasters themselves.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  > This should induce criminal charges not against the software developer, it should induce charges against management and those that believed the data is enough for a conviction. Difficult case because that would also implicate judges and public prosecutors. Of course that will not happen, but they are guilty far more than Fujitsu. Not against the software developer? Let's wait and see whether they did due dilligence, shall we? This happened over a very very long period of time. People committed suicide over these false charges. Ruling out prosecuting the developer if it can be proved that they knew, did nothing, colluded in silence, etc., would be insane. FWIW, I don't think "public prosecutors" in the conventional sense (Crown, CPS etc.) were even involved here. The Royal Mail is (like until recently the RSPCA) one of the few entities in the UK entitled to bring its own prosecutions. The Royal Mail pretty much invented the concept of formal investigation and prosecution. This is the Post Office acting with the assumed prosecutorial power of the state; the CPS may not ever have been involved.
  - agilob 5y ago
    > Ruling out prosecuting the developer if it can be proved that they knew, did nothing, colluded in silence, etc., would be insane. This should also include developers doing code review of the code in topic, but also all related code, all testers/QAs and product owner. There isn't one developer that missed that bug.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      I don't know where you find the limits here, in the sense that at some level there is a mistake here. People make mistakes. What I do think is that anyone who pretended there wasn't a mistake, downplayed it when they knew it could be causing the prosecutions or even significant reconciliation issues, should be looked at. First and foremost, in the UK, Fujitsu itself can (and I think should) be prosecuted for corporate manslaughter here if there is any evidence that Fujitsu executives conspired with the Post Office to keep this quiet, ever. If anyone ever ordered a developer not to go public with their complaints, threatened a whistleblower, deleted evidence, that should crush Fujitsu for good. But yes, individual executives should be at risk (the corporate veil can be pierced to include directors), and it's difficult to see how it is possible to rule out right now that there is real liability down the chain. The situation at the Royal Mail is likely to be dramatically more serious, because there's a significant chance they were both covering up serious failings and knowingly directly prosecuting people to do so.
      - agilob 5y ago
        >I don't know where you find the limits here, in the sense that at some level there is a mistake here. People make mistakes. I worked in a highly regulated company, we were under supervision of FDA, EMA and German EMA. We once missed a bug in database migration where a boolean field was false by default in java (non-nullabe), but it could be null in database column. It apparently broke a few reports (NOT running software, just pdf reports) for pharmacological clinics, 2 developers, 2 testers, our PO and out CTO had "disciplinary" actions (don't remember what it was really called) and their actions were under supervision from external consultants our company had to pay for. It's crazy we don't have such rules in finance, food, data processing and publishing industries. > The situation at the Royal Mail is likely to be dramatically more serious, because there's a significant chance they were both covering up serious failings and knowingly directly prosecuting people to do so. Yes, RM decided to start internal investigation that lasted a few years, instead immediately contacting police, this is why it lasted so long and were so many victims.
- zelos 5y ago
  I really hope that it ends up with Post Office management in prison for a long time. There seems to be evidence that they shredded incriminating documents: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252498245/Post-Office-staff-instructed-to-shred-documents-that-undermined-its-claims-Horizon-was-robust https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252498245/Post-Office-st... According to one interview I heard, part of the problem is that the level of compensation that's actually required in this case is enough to render the Post Office insolvent.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    > According to one interview I heard, part of the problem is that the level of compensation that's actually required in this case is enough to render the Post Office insolvent. Yes. And some families cannot be made whole; people killed themselves over this. (Just as they did over false prosecutions from "erroneous transfers" due to technical card fraud, which a researcher once alleged in The Register was propagated by the IT staff of a British bank)
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    > According to one interview I heard, part of the problem is that the level of compensation that's actually required in this case is enough to render the Post Office insolvent From a legal perspective that shouldn't be a problem, and isn't a good argument for lesser compensation. Either Post Office Ltd can get a loan, get bought or go bankrupt, like any private company. If it's the last one that will obviously create political fallout, but resolving that isn't the job of the justice system.
  - samwillis 5y ago
    > part of the problem is that the level of compensation that's actually required in this case is enough to render the Post Office insolvent. That would be good IMHO. Some people will disagree, but the post office going bust, and then nationalised would be a good outcome. It should never have been allowed to be privatised, it’s a national service, a place for providing contact to many different essential national provisions. True it needed to cut costs, moving into smaller premises does that. Even the partnership with WH Smith’s and village news agents are sensible. But it should fundamentally be a government provision. And while they are at it nationalise Royal Mail, and properly split Open Reach from BT and nationalise that too.
- candiodari 5y ago
  That's the problem with government: 1) the justice system will not easily go against any government organization (because government has decreed that individual government workers carry responsibility "by default" for what the government does, unless the employee can prove the government maliciously caused the mistake (just causing the mistake, for example with bad info, is not enough), as opposed to the private sector, where businesses are "by default" responsible for mistakes, unless the business can prove an employee to be malicious) This means in a lot of cases judges have a choice when the government causes damage: destroy an employee's career AND giving them a very large fine, to be paid personally, or do nothing. Going after the individual is so unfair this is rarely done. That is probably exactly the intention. 2) government organizations, all of them, have legislative power to some extent (sometimes only over their own internal procedures. However, generally, it goes further. For example, the NHS can refuse care to an individual at their own judgement. Private MD's, by contrast, cannot refuse "basic" care, and can certainly not make that judgement themselves) 3) the justice system will only move against it's own people with extreme reluctance. Certainly mistakes won't be punished (they do this while repeating "how much responsibility they need to shoulder" at every turn. Asking how much responsibility it really is if there's no personal or even organizational consequences when they screw up is not appreciated. They have about the same level of responsibility as the player does in GTA5) So, you don't do business with local governments as a consultant ("other" governmental organizations, from National Government over ATC to NAVO offices, are fine)
  - lbriner 5y ago
    Sorry this is mostly BS. 1) The justice system will not go easily against any large organisation unless they believe there is a case to answer. It isn't about whether something bad happened, it is whether somebody could be guilt in law. Governments blame their workers by default? Based on what? Going after the individual is so unfair? Again, that is simply not true. If an individual breaks the law, they will be prosecuted if there is a good chance of a conviction. The reason they don't always is because incompetence is not illegal. 2) The government organisations do NOT have legislative power. The NHS doesn't make up the laws, they abide by the laws of the land. They have some latitude within law but they are (and often are) still subjected to legal action both personally and corporately. 3) The reluctance is not against "it's own people", the judiciary is not the government in the UK. Again, there are laws which protect politicians from certain decisions but they are not above the law. Of course, there is always the potential for hidden pressure to make problems go away etc. but most of what you say seems to be inferred from prejudice, not from facts.
- Tainnor 5y ago
  > A software error needs to be calculated for. This is technical reality that cannot be changed as of today. Of course that also implicates other industries like banking. The problem is that, unlike forensic analyses and other scientific methods, the likelihood and nature of software errors is totally unpredictable. Most regular people would expect an accounting software to maybe have UI bugs, or being occasionally unavailable, or any other number of annoying, but ultimately insignificant issues. They wouldn't expect it to mess up accounting. Software is only "eating the world" because people trust its usefulness. At some point I wonder if we as an industry are not about to teach the world that software is not to be trusted, at least not for high-stakes situations. This is not the only example, think also about e.g. the Equifax security breach or the Boeing 737 Max disaster.
  - rosndo 5y ago
    > the Equifax security breach or the Boeing 737 Max disaster Poor taste to conflate a nothingburger with the deaths of 346 people.
- open-source-ux 5y ago
  "This should induce criminal charges not against the software developer, it should induce charges against management" This is often repeated by developers and it reeks of hypocrisy. Of course management must be implicated, but so must be the developers. Innocent developers are not simply helpless cogs in the machine coerced by management. This blameless attitude held by many developers permeates the software industry. Whether it's the Volkswagen emissions scandal, ad-tech, or widespread online tracking - these were conceived, built and implemented by developers. And yet developers think they stand apart blameless from the consequences of their shoddy practices. I wonder if the Fujitsi developers, far removed from the Post Office staff, have ever stopped to consider that the software they wrote ruined the lives of so many people.
  - JonChesterfield 5y ago
    > I wonder if the Fujitsi developers, far removed from the Post Office staff, have ever stopped to consider that the software they wrote ruined the lives of so many people. They may not even be aware that they worked on this. Or they may have relayed concerns about schedule pressure making errors inevitable, or may be working in an environment where no such concerns can ever be raised. It seems likely that they're working in the before-testing times which correlates strongly with risk of the above. I wonder about the procurement process that lead to Fujitsu supplying the UK post office. This might be an instance of the public sector picking the cheapest from N bids then looking surprised when cheapest turns out to mean crap.
    - open-source-ux 5y ago
      All you say are plausible scenarios. But there is also another one: the developers were simply not very good at writing code - neither diligent, thorough, or aware of good practices. Or they simply didn't care about the bugs or errors even if they knew about them. They never had to suffer the consequences.
      - jhugo 5y ago
        The developers in question probably don't even work for Fujitsu. They probably work outside the UK, in the software equivalent of a sweatshop, and spend most of their time copy-pasting from Stack Overflow and writing the kind of incoherent GitHub issue comments that every maintainer of a high-profile OSS project has to deal with these days. They provide the single-digit-dollars-per-hour code output, and Fujitsu makes sure the requirements are vague enough that they can meet them with the resulting dumpster fire, and this is the result.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  This is only incidentally a software issue. It's a software issue that accidentally - but perhaps inevitably - highlighted a political issue. Which is an example of dysfunctional corporate dictatorship. What actually happened here is that some people dared to question the hierarchy. Since that was unpossible - underlings can never be allowed to question hierarchy - it turned into a political circus where the authorities spent insane amounts of time and money trying to maintain an established order that was in fact broken. If this seems extreme, consider that in a functional system someone would have said "Wait, that looks wrong, we'd better fix that." There would have been some inconvenience and expense and possibly some awkward questions. But it was essentially a trivial issue, and the cost-to-fix would have been far lower than it will be now. Dysfunctional hierarchies are defined by this kind of refusal to deal with reality when inconvenient facts are presented by those who are considered subordinate. It literally becomes more important to punish those who challenge authority than to fix the real problem.
- Diggsey 5y ago
  > Difficult case because that would also implicate judges and public prosecutors I don't think judges would be implicated here. the court relies on expert witnesses to explain what to do with a piece of evidence. For example, if someone is convicted based on DNA evidence, you would have an expert in DNA matching explain the probability of this happening by chance. If a supposed expert in the software testified that this is impossible to happen unless money actually went missing, and that witness appeared credible, then what can you do?
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > implicate judges Unless these cases were tried without juries, then the judge's responsibility is restricted to ensuring the case is conducted properly; that both prosecution and defence evidence is heard, and that only permitted evidence gets presented to the jury. It's not the judge's fault if some witness lies to the jury.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
This case is one I've been watching for a while. It's astonishing. No money ever went missing. It merely _seemed_ to have, and that was the entire foundation for what happened. Fujitsu should take no blame at all. Their software is crap. But so is everyone's. That's software. We know and accept that in the industry. > The inquiry will look at whether the Post Office knew about faults in the IT system It did, because hundreds of users reported them. It chose to attack those users and bullheadedly believe that the system could not be wrong. Once their position was entrenched it became about "How dare mere mortals challenge technology?" It led to a staggering spectacle of bullying (through relentless legal threats, stone-walling, harassment, and wrongful prosecution) that caused many of the victims to suffer severe health effects or contemplate suicide. > our first priority is that full, fair and final compensation is provided Rubbish. This is about more than compensation. There is no _final_ to this. It needs dragging out into the sunlight. Sure, people lost their livelihoods, marriages, homes and years of their lives over this. Deep pockets might cover it. But if mere compensation is allowed to cover-up this episode a travesty will have occurred. The issue is about fundamental changes we need to make around our relation to technology that allows grave errors made by weak-minded people to hide behind it. As we put ever more trust in digital forensics, telemetry, algorithmic policing, face-recognition, automated fraud detection and so on, more innocent people will have their lives ruined because we are falling into abject snivelling surrender before technology, far beyond anything Ellul, Mumford, Freud or Weber foresaw. This speaks to a fundamental error in _how_ technology is being used. > lessons are learned so that such events can never happen again Sadly, they will happen again and again and again, I think.
- gm3dmo 5y ago
  > Sadly, they will happen again and again and again, I think. The principles that the Government Digital Service tried to instill/make departments adopt should prevent that I think that kind of behaviour was endemic among outsourcing companies around that time and they acted with impunity on government contracts. Sky outsourced a contract to EDS. EDS had delivery problems. It all ended in court: https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/guides/bskyb-v-eds https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/guides/bskyb-v-eds What won it for Sky seemed to be the fundamental dishonesty of a single individual at EDS who claimed they had worked on an MBA that anybody could buy via an "internet university". The Sky lawyer bought a degree for the dog named Rover. The could have gotten away with incompetence but when the liar doubled down on lying that was the end.
dandare 5y ago
Software flaw lead to incorrect numbers being displayed on a monitor. It was something very different that lead to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK legal history.
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  > It was something very different that lead to the most widespread miscarriage of justice "Between 2000 and 2014, more than 700 sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false"
  - carlmr 5y ago
    I think what OP meant is that the software might have made a mistake, but the miscarriage of justice was performed by the humans that just blindly sided with known buggy software. We have to institute processes that make sure that business software is scrutinized first before blaming any humans. B2B software in large corporations and governments is almost always buggy. At least as a developer I've only seen horrific software in the B2B space. It's simple to see why. Governments and large corporations usually buy stuff centrally. So the users of the software are almost never involved in buying decisions. This leads to software being bought with a list of demands to be ticked off on a checklist. Counterintuitive UX? Constant crashes? One wrong click corrupting the database? This is almost the standard, and there's no incentive for these companies to improve. The buyers did their thing, you have to deal with it.
    - dandare 5y ago
      What the OP meant was a reaction to the original title here on HN that read: "Software flaw lead to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK legal history." I am glad the title was de-clickbaited :)
brianmcc 5y ago
As others have noted this is 100% about disastrous management decisions around a software flaw. These decisions, made over and over again, must surely come close to criminal negligence. This will be a case study in the future, it's just awful how these post masters were treated.
- josefx 5y ago
  Criminal negligence? Some of the articles linked by other comments indicate that the Post Office ordered all meeting minutes that discussed flaws in the software shredded and in some cases even prohibited note taking to ensure that there were no documents to disclose on the issue. They actively and intentionally went out of their way to destroy peoples lives just so they didn't have to admit fault.
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    Video recording from a Post Office meeting concerning the flaws: https://youtu.be/pBdGOrcUEg8 https://youtu.be/pBdGOrcUEg8
  - brianmcc 5y ago
    That's what I mean - surely this is grounds for criminal prosecution? I expect it's almost certainly up for grabs in terms of civil action, but IMO there must be some level of outright illegality here?
greatgib 5y ago
This is so awful, imagine if you were the guy that lost 3 years of his life, locked, with the shame, and the fear that no one will believe you... In my opinion, someone between the prosecutor or the one that took the decision to sue should be sentenced to at least the same thing so that they could realize what they did. Imagine at the original trial when the prosecutor probably did not have enough wrong words to justify how this person was a thief and a liar and should have an "exemplary" punishment...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aaron695 5y ago
hardlianotion 5y ago
Scandalous to me that although the software is entirely discredited, and although this has been known for years now, only 72 people have been cleared.
- dataflow 5y ago
  Yeah! That's the part that's left me scratching my head. They know the software is flawed (at least now!), and they still presume these people are guilty unless proven innocent? How is that not "miscarriage of justice"?!
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Well, each case has to be annulled individually - the justice system doesn't do bulk acquittals I think. It's also hugely embarrassing to the justice system of course. In a way it's the fault of societies near blind assumption that expert=truthful. The Fujitsu people need to go to jail because they repeatedly assured the courts that the software couldn't be at fault even though they had a bug tracker full of loss-of-transactionality bugs. And the legal system just said, well, they're the experts, so if they said it, it's true.
    - dataflow 5y ago
      That sounds like perjury... did they really just lie to the court? Or were they just not competent enough to realize loss of transactionality can affect this? In the latter case it sure sounds like maybe courts should ask for the actual data (e.g. bug tickets) and have an independent expert assess them?
      - native_samples 5y ago
        The actual bug tickets etc are public. There is a report that's been published into what happened that goes into a lot of detail on each individual failure. In most cases they figured out what was wrong. The requirements for the system was kind of a programmers worst nightmare tbh - they needed a very complex and frequently changing database app to be usable offline, so they had to implement a lot of sync and conflict reconciliation logic that frequently turned out to be buggy or have race conditions. They also had incredibly awkward bugs like "the touch screen hardware we deployed had a bad manufacturing batch that caused a subset to start submitting random button presses 12 months after deployment". It took them a while to realize that the actions weren't genuinely being made by the post masters, etc. And yeah, iirc they lied to the court. Courts are supposed to anticipate this of course, but unfortunately defense teams near universally didn't push them on this or try to uncover their lies. Like I said, our culture has a severe problem with assuming experts are always honest and trustworthy. It's a totally flawed assumption and it resulted in hundreds of lives being destroyed in this case, but literally, nobody in the legal system including the defense really tried to probe whether the software really did work as the authors said it did. They just accepted the assurances made that it was perfect.
ndsipa_pomu 5y ago
I've been reading about this and am puzzled as to why there's no mention of perjury. No matter the quality of the software, someone took the position in courts that the software was essentially infallible and that is the real crime. Software flaws were not the reason that people were imprisoned and I think it's disingenuous of the BBC to report it that way (I do currently have several complaints against the BBC's reporting of LTNs and cycling waiting to be addressed). Edit: My ire may be misplaced - the BBC article is titled differently to the Hacker News description.
trollied 5y ago
If anyone is interested in the actual bugs that caused these issues, you can read about them on page 33 onwards in this PDF https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-post-office-appendix-1.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...
- mijoharas 5y ago
  I was somewhat interested in this, and started reading a little bit. The section digging into the bugs runs from page 33 to page 106. (I stopped reading after a few pages) While there is additional commentary on the testimony given on each bug, and the time it was in effect, along with the legal relevance e.t.c., this does seem like a very buggy piece of software.
threshold 5y ago
- mhh__ 5y ago
  No one gets sent to prison because of TV licences.
  - threshold 5y ago
    False. You get a fine and if you can’t pay, jail. And they did that at scale. Punishing the poor for not funding state propaganda television. And how about that time in the 80s when MPs went on primetime TV and ate cheeseburgers telling the public british beef was safe - knowing it wasn’t - protecting the small farms that skirted the safety precautions and were slaughtering sick animals and feeding people poison. Then thousands dropped dead of CJD a few years later. How about that time the british media told the public to allow themselves to get infected by covid and encouraged them to gather? Whats the body count for that I wonder?
    - Veen 5y ago
      Fewer than 200 people died of Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the UK in the last 30 years. You're talking shite.
      - threshold 5y ago
        The hell I am. 1 in 2000 UK citizens are infected with abnormal prions. CJD can be latent for 20-40 years. In addition they covered up early deaths from CJD to prevent a revolt, mislabeling cause of death. Seriously pull on that thread
  - chaircher 5y ago
    No one you know has been sent to prison over TV licences. The TV licence people disproportionately target vulnerable people. If you're not living in a homeless shelter or leaving local authority care you're probably not going to come into contact with them.
mhh__ 5y ago
The British criminal justice system is apparently falling apart, it would be a tragedy if no (or insufficient) heads roll for this.
- stefan_ 5y ago
  The UK is truly a failed state. Up until a week ago they had a police chief that literally gave the order to execute an entirely innocent person in public transport.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I don't want to start quibbling about abuse of the word "literally", but that's not what happened. As well as policemen, there were a couple of MI5 agents pursuing Menezes, and she gave them permission to act on their own initiative. It's those guys that cornered him and shot him dead. I think she made a terrible decision; but she didn't literally give the order.
Accacin 5y ago
The Private Eye constantly bought this up, even when I didn't see it talked about in other news publications. I can't remember the exact specifics, but Fujitsu are absolutely to blame in this. They knew about software bugs that caused these issues since 1999. Private Eye had a great report on this whole saga: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-i... (you can download the report as a PDF on that site).
- joefife 5y ago
  They also have a good podcast on this. https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49
  - Accacin 5y ago
    Thanks! I'd forgotten about that one.
  - jayelbe 5y ago
    This is really good, thank you!
- daddylonglegs 5y ago
  As I recall, Computer Weekly and Private Eye have been reporting this for over a decade. This is the second major scandal in recent decades where Computer Weekly, a trade rag, have doggedly held truth to power. The other case I'm thinking of is the Mull of Kintyre crash and the terrible state of the firmware in the helicopters.
  - Accacin 5y ago
    Oh, I don't think I've ever read Computer Weekly. Reading through their whole timeline now :)
- lbriner 5y ago
  I can imagine a Politician saying that the private business of a "private" company is nothing to do with them but what have Politicians done when their consituents were jailed for fraud? Did they assume it was true because they didn't know how many other people with no previous convictions were also jailed? I guess it is hard since it happened over such a long time, it is easy to assume that the levels look legit, a few 10s of people per year or whatever. Sounds really scary though.
T3RMINATED 5y ago
bennysomething 5y ago
I hope the people who knowingly covered this up can be brought to justice. It appears that they purposely sent innocent people to prison, I think they probably deserve the same. Also, before software can be used as evidence in court it should have to pass some sort of verification process and maybe it should have to be open sourced too.
laurieg 5y ago
This BBC podcast covers the story including interviews with some of the people directly affected: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j
toomanybeersies 5y ago
An eerily similar debacle in Australia was the Robodebt scheme [1]. Hundreds of thousands of people were issued debt notices for apparent overpayment of unemployment benefits, based on fundamentally incorrect assumptions when calculating peoples income. The system was such a failure that the government ended up wiping all the debts incurred under the scheme, and refunding those who had made repayments. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
SeanLuke 5y ago
How is it that 700 people were accused, but only 70 have had their names cleared so far?
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  UK doesn't seem too concerned to keep innocents in prison.
stadium 5y ago
Accounting software needs internal process controls. There should have been a team of accountants executing checks and balances to make sure the numbers tie out each month end before closing the books for that month. What was happening on the process side that enabled these bugs to persist undetected for so long? How were the bugs discovered and proven? Why is the CFO or controller's role in these failures not mentioned?
lbriner 5y ago
Isn't the big question, how did someone convince the Court(s) that the software couldn't possibly be wrong and therefore the case is proved beyond a reasonable doubt? This sounds like a failure on so-many levels. The defence should easily have thrown this out. Presumably if Fujitsu sent their own witness to say the software was not broken, they committed perjury since it sounds like a fair number of people knew about bugs.
denton-scratch 5y ago
I worked on the bid for an earlier version of the Post Office Counter-mechanisation project ("counter-mech"). That effort failed, as did several other efforts. The failure was definitely the result of truly awful Post Office management of the project. FWIW, our bid was doomed - Big Blue had already stitched it up (as in, "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"). As a result of that experience, I am predisposed to conclude that the system failings were not Fujitsu's fault, but the Post Office's. The PO doesn't have a sparkling record in IT procurement. That the PO went after postmasters, knowing that the system they were required to use was reporting false numbers, is appalling, and I hope some executives get jailed. But I don't hold out much hope; the culprits have probably already retired, and figuring out exactly who (among the many people that must have known) to hold responsible looks like the devil of a task.
938rrhri3hirhi3 5y ago
Here is another example of a software error causing lost money. It’s nowhere near as bad as for these postmasters, but quite a few real people must be getting ripped off. I bought a prepaid SIM card from Vodafone which was supposed to be 45Gb for 2 years for £45 in August 2021, it’s for a tablet and I don’t use it off wifi very often. The data just stopped working recently, I complained and they told me the plan was activated in 2020 and had expired. I said that was impossible and I had the receipts to prove it and they were supposed to have fixed it but haven’t done so. I think they are just betting that I won’t bother to follow it up any more. It just so happens that I don’t need a lot of mobile data and that setup is convenient for me but I wonder how many people on low incomes who use prepaid SIMs are being swindled out of their money by Vodafone. I’m tempted to take it to small claims court just on principal, but I don’t know if I can find the time or the energy to do it right now.
meldyr 5y ago
A similar case happened in the Netherlands. Many people living on government allowances had been paid too much. Instead of admitting their mistake government officials decided to retrieve the money and sue for fraud. The result is that many people struggling with poverty had to repay a lot of money, pay for their legal defense and pay fines. Because they had been labeled fraudulent they could often not reapply to any government allowance. Children were taken away from their ‘criminal parents’ and many of them burnt out, relapsed into previous psychological illness or had to live in poverty for years. It is lazy to blame this on the software. Nobody bothered to check their story or owned up for there mistake.

271 points by nickdothutton 5y ago

I don't know how the ridiculous idea that a result of a computer program can be implicitly trusted got into the minds of people, but we better get it out sooner rather than later. Convictions based only on evidence provided by software - without other supporting evidence or a formal proof of software correctness (that doesn't exist for pretty much any commonly used software) should not be a thing. It's a shame that the judiciary seems to be bedazzled by the new shiny toys and fail to recognize how flawed they are in reality.

raxxorrax 5y ago

This should induce criminal charges not against the software developer, it should induce charges against management and those that believed the data is enough for a conviction. Difficult case because that would also implicate judges and public prosecutors. Of course that will not happen, but they are guilty far more than Fujitsu. A software error needs to be calculated for. This is technical reality that cannot be changed as of today. Of course that also implicates other industries like banking. I don't think the UK government has enough money to compensate the people it wrongfully convicted. It is harrowing mismanagement that the software wasn't tested immediately before any conviction. Everyone failed here aside from the postmasters themselves.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> This should induce criminal charges not against the software developer, it should induce charges against management and those that believed the data is enough for a conviction. Difficult case because that would also implicate judges and public prosecutors. Of course that will not happen, but they are guilty far more than Fujitsu. Not against the software developer? Let's wait and see whether they did due dilligence, shall we? This happened over a very very long period of time. People committed suicide over these false charges. Ruling out prosecuting the developer if it can be proved that they knew, did nothing, colluded in silence, etc., would be insane. FWIW, I don't think "public prosecutors" in the conventional sense (Crown, CPS etc.) were even involved here. The Royal Mail is (like until recently the RSPCA) one of the few entities in the UK entitled to bring its own prosecutions. The Royal Mail pretty much invented the concept of formal investigation and prosecution. This is the Post Office acting with the assumed prosecutorial power of the state; the CPS may not ever have been involved.
- agilob 5y ago
  > Ruling out prosecuting the developer if it can be proved that they knew, did nothing, colluded in silence, etc., would be insane. This should also include developers doing code review of the code in topic, but also all related code, all testers/QAs and product owner. There isn't one developer that missed that bug.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    I don't know where you find the limits here, in the sense that at some level there is a mistake here. People make mistakes. What I do think is that anyone who pretended there wasn't a mistake, downplayed it when they knew it could be causing the prosecutions or even significant reconciliation issues, should be looked at. First and foremost, in the UK, Fujitsu itself can (and I think should) be prosecuted for corporate manslaughter here if there is any evidence that Fujitsu executives conspired with the Post Office to keep this quiet, ever. If anyone ever ordered a developer not to go public with their complaints, threatened a whistleblower, deleted evidence, that should crush Fujitsu for good. But yes, individual executives should be at risk (the corporate veil can be pierced to include directors), and it's difficult to see how it is possible to rule out right now that there is real liability down the chain. The situation at the Royal Mail is likely to be dramatically more serious, because there's a significant chance they were both covering up serious failings and knowingly directly prosecuting people to do so.
    - agilob 5y ago
      >I don't know where you find the limits here, in the sense that at some level there is a mistake here. People make mistakes. I worked in a highly regulated company, we were under supervision of FDA, EMA and German EMA. We once missed a bug in database migration where a boolean field was false by default in java (non-nullabe), but it could be null in database column. It apparently broke a few reports (NOT running software, just pdf reports) for pharmacological clinics, 2 developers, 2 testers, our PO and out CTO had "disciplinary" actions (don't remember what it was really called) and their actions were under supervision from external consultants our company had to pay for. It's crazy we don't have such rules in finance, food, data processing and publishing industries. > The situation at the Royal Mail is likely to be dramatically more serious, because there's a significant chance they were both covering up serious failings and knowingly directly prosecuting people to do so. Yes, RM decided to start internal investigation that lasted a few years, instead immediately contacting police, this is why it lasted so long and were so many victims.
zelos 5y ago
I really hope that it ends up with Post Office management in prison for a long time. There seems to be evidence that they shredded incriminating documents: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252498245/Post-Office-staff-instructed-to-shred-documents-that-undermined-its-claims-Horizon-was-robust https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252498245/Post-Office-st... According to one interview I heard, part of the problem is that the level of compensation that's actually required in this case is enough to render the Post Office insolvent.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  > According to one interview I heard, part of the problem is that the level of compensation that's actually required in this case is enough to render the Post Office insolvent. Yes. And some families cannot be made whole; people killed themselves over this. (Just as they did over false prosecutions from "erroneous transfers" due to technical card fraud, which a researcher once alleged in The Register was propagated by the IT staff of a British bank)
- wongarsu 5y ago
  > According to one interview I heard, part of the problem is that the level of compensation that's actually required in this case is enough to render the Post Office insolvent From a legal perspective that shouldn't be a problem, and isn't a good argument for lesser compensation. Either Post Office Ltd can get a loan, get bought or go bankrupt, like any private company. If it's the last one that will obviously create political fallout, but resolving that isn't the job of the justice system.
- samwillis 5y ago
  > part of the problem is that the level of compensation that's actually required in this case is enough to render the Post Office insolvent. That would be good IMHO. Some people will disagree, but the post office going bust, and then nationalised would be a good outcome. It should never have been allowed to be privatised, it’s a national service, a place for providing contact to many different essential national provisions. True it needed to cut costs, moving into smaller premises does that. Even the partnership with WH Smith’s and village news agents are sensible. But it should fundamentally be a government provision. And while they are at it nationalise Royal Mail, and properly split Open Reach from BT and nationalise that too.
candiodari 5y ago
That's the problem with government: 1) the justice system will not easily go against any government organization (because government has decreed that individual government workers carry responsibility "by default" for what the government does, unless the employee can prove the government maliciously caused the mistake (just causing the mistake, for example with bad info, is not enough), as opposed to the private sector, where businesses are "by default" responsible for mistakes, unless the business can prove an employee to be malicious) This means in a lot of cases judges have a choice when the government causes damage: destroy an employee's career AND giving them a very large fine, to be paid personally, or do nothing. Going after the individual is so unfair this is rarely done. That is probably exactly the intention. 2) government organizations, all of them, have legislative power to some extent (sometimes only over their own internal procedures. However, generally, it goes further. For example, the NHS can refuse care to an individual at their own judgement. Private MD's, by contrast, cannot refuse "basic" care, and can certainly not make that judgement themselves) 3) the justice system will only move against it's own people with extreme reluctance. Certainly mistakes won't be punished (they do this while repeating "how much responsibility they need to shoulder" at every turn. Asking how much responsibility it really is if there's no personal or even organizational consequences when they screw up is not appreciated. They have about the same level of responsibility as the player does in GTA5) So, you don't do business with local governments as a consultant ("other" governmental organizations, from National Government over ATC to NAVO offices, are fine)
- lbriner 5y ago
  Sorry this is mostly BS. 1) The justice system will not go easily against any large organisation unless they believe there is a case to answer. It isn't about whether something bad happened, it is whether somebody could be guilt in law. Governments blame their workers by default? Based on what? Going after the individual is so unfair? Again, that is simply not true. If an individual breaks the law, they will be prosecuted if there is a good chance of a conviction. The reason they don't always is because incompetence is not illegal. 2) The government organisations do NOT have legislative power. The NHS doesn't make up the laws, they abide by the laws of the land. They have some latitude within law but they are (and often are) still subjected to legal action both personally and corporately. 3) The reluctance is not against "it's own people", the judiciary is not the government in the UK. Again, there are laws which protect politicians from certain decisions but they are not above the law. Of course, there is always the potential for hidden pressure to make problems go away etc. but most of what you say seems to be inferred from prejudice, not from facts.
Tainnor 5y ago
> A software error needs to be calculated for. This is technical reality that cannot be changed as of today. Of course that also implicates other industries like banking. The problem is that, unlike forensic analyses and other scientific methods, the likelihood and nature of software errors is totally unpredictable. Most regular people would expect an accounting software to maybe have UI bugs, or being occasionally unavailable, or any other number of annoying, but ultimately insignificant issues. They wouldn't expect it to mess up accounting. Software is only "eating the world" because people trust its usefulness. At some point I wonder if we as an industry are not about to teach the world that software is not to be trusted, at least not for high-stakes situations. This is not the only example, think also about e.g. the Equifax security breach or the Boeing 737 Max disaster.
- rosndo 5y ago
  > the Equifax security breach or the Boeing 737 Max disaster Poor taste to conflate a nothingburger with the deaths of 346 people.
open-source-ux 5y ago
"This should induce criminal charges not against the software developer, it should induce charges against management" This is often repeated by developers and it reeks of hypocrisy. Of course management must be implicated, but so must be the developers. Innocent developers are not simply helpless cogs in the machine coerced by management. This blameless attitude held by many developers permeates the software industry. Whether it's the Volkswagen emissions scandal, ad-tech, or widespread online tracking - these were conceived, built and implemented by developers. And yet developers think they stand apart blameless from the consequences of their shoddy practices. I wonder if the Fujitsi developers, far removed from the Post Office staff, have ever stopped to consider that the software they wrote ruined the lives of so many people.
- JonChesterfield 5y ago
  > I wonder if the Fujitsi developers, far removed from the Post Office staff, have ever stopped to consider that the software they wrote ruined the lives of so many people. They may not even be aware that they worked on this. Or they may have relayed concerns about schedule pressure making errors inevitable, or may be working in an environment where no such concerns can ever be raised. It seems likely that they're working in the before-testing times which correlates strongly with risk of the above. I wonder about the procurement process that lead to Fujitsu supplying the UK post office. This might be an instance of the public sector picking the cheapest from N bids then looking surprised when cheapest turns out to mean crap.
  - open-source-ux 5y ago
    All you say are plausible scenarios. But there is also another one: the developers were simply not very good at writing code - neither diligent, thorough, or aware of good practices. Or they simply didn't care about the bugs or errors even if they knew about them. They never had to suffer the consequences.
    - jhugo 5y ago
      The developers in question probably don't even work for Fujitsu. They probably work outside the UK, in the software equivalent of a sweatshop, and spend most of their time copy-pasting from Stack Overflow and writing the kind of incoherent GitHub issue comments that every maintainer of a high-profile OSS project has to deal with these days. They provide the single-digit-dollars-per-hour code output, and Fujitsu makes sure the requirements are vague enough that they can meet them with the resulting dumpster fire, and this is the result.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
This is only incidentally a software issue. It's a software issue that accidentally - but perhaps inevitably - highlighted a political issue. Which is an example of dysfunctional corporate dictatorship. What actually happened here is that some people dared to question the hierarchy. Since that was unpossible - underlings can never be allowed to question hierarchy - it turned into a political circus where the authorities spent insane amounts of time and money trying to maintain an established order that was in fact broken. If this seems extreme, consider that in a functional system someone would have said "Wait, that looks wrong, we'd better fix that." There would have been some inconvenience and expense and possibly some awkward questions. But it was essentially a trivial issue, and the cost-to-fix would have been far lower than it will be now. Dysfunctional hierarchies are defined by this kind of refusal to deal with reality when inconvenient facts are presented by those who are considered subordinate. It literally becomes more important to punish those who challenge authority than to fix the real problem.
Diggsey 5y ago
> Difficult case because that would also implicate judges and public prosecutors I don't think judges would be implicated here. the court relies on expert witnesses to explain what to do with a piece of evidence. For example, if someone is convicted based on DNA evidence, you would have an expert in DNA matching explain the probability of this happening by chance. If a supposed expert in the software testified that this is impossible to happen unless money actually went missing, and that witness appeared credible, then what can you do?
denton-scratch 5y ago
> implicate judges Unless these cases were tried without juries, then the judge's responsibility is restricted to ensuring the case is conducted properly; that both prosecution and defence evidence is heard, and that only permitted evidence gets presented to the jury. It's not the judge's fault if some witness lies to the jury.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

This case is one I've been watching for a while. It's astonishing. No money ever went missing. It merely _seemed_ to have, and that was the entire foundation for what happened. Fujitsu should take no blame at all. Their software is crap. But so is everyone's. That's software. We know and accept that in the industry. > The inquiry will look at whether the Post Office knew about faults in the IT system It did, because hundreds of users reported them. It chose to attack those users and bullheadedly believe that the system could not be wrong. Once their position was entrenched it became about "How dare mere mortals challenge technology?" It led to a staggering spectacle of bullying (through relentless legal threats, stone-walling, harassment, and wrongful prosecution) that caused many of the victims to suffer severe health effects or contemplate suicide. > our first priority is that full, fair and final compensation is provided Rubbish. This is about more than compensation. There is no _final_ to this. It needs dragging out into the sunlight. Sure, people lost their livelihoods, marriages, homes and years of their lives over this. Deep pockets might cover it. But if mere compensation is allowed to cover-up this episode a travesty will have occurred. The issue is about fundamental changes we need to make around our relation to technology that allows grave errors made by weak-minded people to hide behind it. As we put ever more trust in digital forensics, telemetry, algorithmic policing, face-recognition, automated fraud detection and so on, more innocent people will have their lives ruined because we are falling into abject snivelling surrender before technology, far beyond anything Ellul, Mumford, Freud or Weber foresaw. This speaks to a fundamental error in _how_ technology is being used. > lessons are learned so that such events can never happen again Sadly, they will happen again and again and again, I think.

gm3dmo 5y ago
> Sadly, they will happen again and again and again, I think. The principles that the Government Digital Service tried to instill/make departments adopt should prevent that I think that kind of behaviour was endemic among outsourcing companies around that time and they acted with impunity on government contracts. Sky outsourced a contract to EDS. EDS had delivery problems. It all ended in court: https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/guides/bskyb-v-eds https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/guides/bskyb-v-eds What won it for Sky seemed to be the fundamental dishonesty of a single individual at EDS who claimed they had worked on an MBA that anybody could buy via an "internet university". The Sky lawyer bought a degree for the dog named Rover. The could have gotten away with incompetence but when the liar doubled down on lying that was the end.

dandare 5y ago

Software flaw lead to incorrect numbers being displayed on a monitor. It was something very different that lead to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK legal history.

KineticLensman 5y ago
> It was something very different that lead to the most widespread miscarriage of justice "Between 2000 and 2014, more than 700 sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false"
- carlmr 5y ago
  I think what OP meant is that the software might have made a mistake, but the miscarriage of justice was performed by the humans that just blindly sided with known buggy software. We have to institute processes that make sure that business software is scrutinized first before blaming any humans. B2B software in large corporations and governments is almost always buggy. At least as a developer I've only seen horrific software in the B2B space. It's simple to see why. Governments and large corporations usually buy stuff centrally. So the users of the software are almost never involved in buying decisions. This leads to software being bought with a list of demands to be ticked off on a checklist. Counterintuitive UX? Constant crashes? One wrong click corrupting the database? This is almost the standard, and there's no incentive for these companies to improve. The buyers did their thing, you have to deal with it.
  - dandare 5y ago
    What the OP meant was a reaction to the original title here on HN that read: "Software flaw lead to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK legal history." I am glad the title was de-clickbaited :)

brianmcc 5y ago

As others have noted this is 100% about disastrous management decisions around a software flaw. These decisions, made over and over again, must surely come close to criminal negligence. This will be a case study in the future, it's just awful how these post masters were treated.

josefx 5y ago
Criminal negligence? Some of the articles linked by other comments indicate that the Post Office ordered all meeting minutes that discussed flaws in the software shredded and in some cases even prohibited note taking to ensure that there were no documents to disclose on the issue. They actively and intentionally went out of their way to destroy peoples lives just so they didn't have to admit fault.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  Video recording from a Post Office meeting concerning the flaws: https://youtu.be/pBdGOrcUEg8 https://youtu.be/pBdGOrcUEg8
- brianmcc 5y ago
  That's what I mean - surely this is grounds for criminal prosecution? I expect it's almost certainly up for grabs in terms of civil action, but IMO there must be some level of outright illegality here?

greatgib 5y ago

This is so awful, imagine if you were the guy that lost 3 years of his life, locked, with the shame, and the fear that no one will believe you... In my opinion, someone between the prosecutor or the one that took the decision to sue should be sentenced to at least the same thing so that they could realize what they did. Imagine at the original trial when the prosecutor probably did not have enough wrong words to justify how this person was a thief and a liar and should have an "exemplary" punishment...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aaron695 5y ago

hardlianotion 5y ago

Scandalous to me that although the software is entirely discredited, and although this has been known for years now, only 72 people have been cleared.

dataflow 5y ago
Yeah! That's the part that's left me scratching my head. They know the software is flawed (at least now!), and they still presume these people are guilty unless proven innocent? How is that not "miscarriage of justice"?!
- native_samples 5y ago
  Well, each case has to be annulled individually - the justice system doesn't do bulk acquittals I think. It's also hugely embarrassing to the justice system of course. In a way it's the fault of societies near blind assumption that expert=truthful. The Fujitsu people need to go to jail because they repeatedly assured the courts that the software couldn't be at fault even though they had a bug tracker full of loss-of-transactionality bugs. And the legal system just said, well, they're the experts, so if they said it, it's true.
  - dataflow 5y ago
    That sounds like perjury... did they really just lie to the court? Or were they just not competent enough to realize loss of transactionality can affect this? In the latter case it sure sounds like maybe courts should ask for the actual data (e.g. bug tickets) and have an independent expert assess them?
    - native_samples 5y ago
      The actual bug tickets etc are public. There is a report that's been published into what happened that goes into a lot of detail on each individual failure. In most cases they figured out what was wrong. The requirements for the system was kind of a programmers worst nightmare tbh - they needed a very complex and frequently changing database app to be usable offline, so they had to implement a lot of sync and conflict reconciliation logic that frequently turned out to be buggy or have race conditions. They also had incredibly awkward bugs like "the touch screen hardware we deployed had a bad manufacturing batch that caused a subset to start submitting random button presses 12 months after deployment". It took them a while to realize that the actions weren't genuinely being made by the post masters, etc. And yeah, iirc they lied to the court. Courts are supposed to anticipate this of course, but unfortunately defense teams near universally didn't push them on this or try to uncover their lies. Like I said, our culture has a severe problem with assuming experts are always honest and trustworthy. It's a totally flawed assumption and it resulted in hundreds of lives being destroyed in this case, but literally, nobody in the legal system including the defense really tried to probe whether the software really did work as the authors said it did. They just accepted the assurances made that it was perfect.

ndsipa_pomu 5y ago

I've been reading about this and am puzzled as to why there's no mention of perjury. No matter the quality of the software, someone took the position in courts that the software was essentially infallible and that is the real crime. Software flaws were not the reason that people were imprisoned and I think it's disingenuous of the BBC to report it that way (I do currently have several complaints against the BBC's reporting of LTNs and cycling waiting to be addressed). Edit: My ire may be misplaced - the BBC article is titled differently to the Hacker News description.

trollied 5y ago

If anyone is interested in the actual bugs that caused these issues, you can read about them on page 33 onwards in this PDF https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-post-office-appendix-1.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...

mijoharas 5y ago
I was somewhat interested in this, and started reading a little bit. The section digging into the bugs runs from page 33 to page 106. (I stopped reading after a few pages) While there is additional commentary on the testimony given on each bug, and the time it was in effect, along with the legal relevance e.t.c., this does seem like a very buggy piece of software.

threshold 5y ago

mhh__ 5y ago
No one gets sent to prison because of TV licences.
- threshold 5y ago
  False. You get a fine and if you can’t pay, jail. And they did that at scale. Punishing the poor for not funding state propaganda television. And how about that time in the 80s when MPs went on primetime TV and ate cheeseburgers telling the public british beef was safe - knowing it wasn’t - protecting the small farms that skirted the safety precautions and were slaughtering sick animals and feeding people poison. Then thousands dropped dead of CJD a few years later. How about that time the british media told the public to allow themselves to get infected by covid and encouraged them to gather? Whats the body count for that I wonder?
  - Veen 5y ago
    Fewer than 200 people died of Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the UK in the last 30 years. You're talking shite.
    - threshold 5y ago
      The hell I am. 1 in 2000 UK citizens are infected with abnormal prions. CJD can be latent for 20-40 years. In addition they covered up early deaths from CJD to prevent a revolt, mislabeling cause of death. Seriously pull on that thread
- chaircher 5y ago
  No one you know has been sent to prison over TV licences. The TV licence people disproportionately target vulnerable people. If you're not living in a homeless shelter or leaving local authority care you're probably not going to come into contact with them.

mhh__ 5y ago

The British criminal justice system is apparently falling apart, it would be a tragedy if no (or insufficient) heads roll for this.

stefan_ 5y ago
The UK is truly a failed state. Up until a week ago they had a police chief that literally gave the order to execute an entirely innocent person in public transport.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  I don't want to start quibbling about abuse of the word "literally", but that's not what happened. As well as policemen, there were a couple of MI5 agents pursuing Menezes, and she gave them permission to act on their own initiative. It's those guys that cornered him and shot him dead. I think she made a terrible decision; but she didn't literally give the order.

Accacin 5y ago

The Private Eye constantly bought this up, even when I didn't see it talked about in other news publications. I can't remember the exact specifics, but Fujitsu are absolutely to blame in this. They knew about software bugs that caused these issues since 1999. Private Eye had a great report on this whole saga: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-i... (you can download the report as a PDF on that site).

joefife 5y ago
They also have a good podcast on this. https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49
- Accacin 5y ago
  Thanks! I'd forgotten about that one.
- jayelbe 5y ago
  This is really good, thank you!
daddylonglegs 5y ago
As I recall, Computer Weekly and Private Eye have been reporting this for over a decade. This is the second major scandal in recent decades where Computer Weekly, a trade rag, have doggedly held truth to power. The other case I'm thinking of is the Mull of Kintyre crash and the terrible state of the firmware in the helicopters.
- Accacin 5y ago
  Oh, I don't think I've ever read Computer Weekly. Reading through their whole timeline now :)
lbriner 5y ago
I can imagine a Politician saying that the private business of a "private" company is nothing to do with them but what have Politicians done when their consituents were jailed for fraud? Did they assume it was true because they didn't know how many other people with no previous convictions were also jailed? I guess it is hard since it happened over such a long time, it is easy to assume that the levels look legit, a few 10s of people per year or whatever. Sounds really scary though.

T3RMINATED 5y ago

bennysomething 5y ago

I hope the people who knowingly covered this up can be brought to justice. It appears that they purposely sent innocent people to prison, I think they probably deserve the same. Also, before software can be used as evidence in court it should have to pass some sort of verification process and maybe it should have to be open sourced too.

laurieg 5y ago

This BBC podcast covers the story including interviews with some of the people directly affected: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j

toomanybeersies 5y ago

An eerily similar debacle in Australia was the Robodebt scheme [1]. Hundreds of thousands of people were issued debt notices for apparent overpayment of unemployment benefits, based on fundamentally incorrect assumptions when calculating peoples income. The system was such a failure that the government ended up wiping all the debts incurred under the scheme, and refunding those who had made repayments. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme

SeanLuke 5y ago

How is it that 700 people were accused, but only 70 have had their names cleared so far?

raxxorrax 5y ago
UK doesn't seem too concerned to keep innocents in prison.

stadium 5y ago

Accounting software needs internal process controls. There should have been a team of accountants executing checks and balances to make sure the numbers tie out each month end before closing the books for that month. What was happening on the process side that enabled these bugs to persist undetected for so long? How were the bugs discovered and proven? Why is the CFO or controller's role in these failures not mentioned?

lbriner 5y ago

Isn't the big question, how did someone convince the Court(s) that the software couldn't possibly be wrong and therefore the case is proved beyond a reasonable doubt? This sounds like a failure on so-many levels. The defence should easily have thrown this out. Presumably if Fujitsu sent their own witness to say the software was not broken, they committed perjury since it sounds like a fair number of people knew about bugs.

denton-scratch 5y ago

I worked on the bid for an earlier version of the Post Office Counter-mechanisation project ("counter-mech"). That effort failed, as did several other efforts. The failure was definitely the result of truly awful Post Office management of the project. FWIW, our bid was doomed - Big Blue had already stitched it up (as in, "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"). As a result of that experience, I am predisposed to conclude that the system failings were not Fujitsu's fault, but the Post Office's. The PO doesn't have a sparkling record in IT procurement. That the PO went after postmasters, knowing that the system they were required to use was reporting false numbers, is appalling, and I hope some executives get jailed. But I don't hold out much hope; the culprits have probably already retired, and figuring out exactly who (among the many people that must have known) to hold responsible looks like the devil of a task.

938rrhri3hirhi3 5y ago

Here is another example of a software error causing lost money. It’s nowhere near as bad as for these postmasters, but quite a few real people must be getting ripped off. I bought a prepaid SIM card from Vodafone which was supposed to be 45Gb for 2 years for £45 in August 2021, it’s for a tablet and I don’t use it off wifi very often. The data just stopped working recently, I complained and they told me the plan was activated in 2020 and had expired. I said that was impossible and I had the receipts to prove it and they were supposed to have fixed it but haven’t done so. I think they are just betting that I won’t bother to follow it up any more. It just so happens that I don’t need a lot of mobile data and that setup is convenient for me but I wonder how many people on low incomes who use prepaid SIMs are being swindled out of their money by Vodafone. I’m tempted to take it to small claims court just on principal, but I don’t know if I can find the time or the energy to do it right now.

meldyr 5y ago

A similar case happened in the Netherlands. Many people living on government allowances had been paid too much. Instead of admitting their mistake government officials decided to retrieve the money and sue for fraud. The result is that many people struggling with poverty had to repay a lot of money, pay for their legal defense and pay fines. Because they had been labeled fraudulent they could often not reapply to any government allowance. Children were taken away from their ‘criminal parents’ and many of them burnt out, relapsed into previous psychological illness or had to live in poverty for years. It is lazy to blame this on the software. Nobody bothered to check their story or owned up for there mistake.