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A TV Show Forced Britain's Devastating Post Office Scandal into the Light

200 points by infotainment 3y ago

zeristor 3y ago
The strange fact is that the Post Office runs its own court system, I take it many people didn't realise this. Having worked through the thicket of rules for FCA regulation I am gob-smacked how far things went.
- switch007 3y ago
  What exactly is meant by "its own court system"? Nothing is coming up when I Google.
- amiga386 3y ago
  It's not that it runs its own court system, but the Post Office was allowed to bring private prosecutions, which is to say a private individual or organization can bring criminal law cases to court as well as vastly more common civil law cases. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_Kin... What the Post Office did have, though, is its own centuries-old investigation team, and much of the scandal hinges on the fact that these investigators are employees of the Post Office and likely knew the accounting system was faulty, and those faults could explain supposed losses, but deliberately disregarded that in bullying and prosecuting subpostmasters into accepting liability for phantom losses.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    Also, as well as in practice exercising control over the Post Office as its owners, the Government is responsible for the Crown Prosecutors, the people who usually carry out criminal prosecutions. For a long time now Crown Prosecutors have been able to seize any existing criminal cases (prosecuted by somebody else) in order to terminate it. They could have stepped in, taken over the case, said "This seems like bullshit" and terminated the prosecution. That's still awful for the postmasters, who have faced a threat of prosecution, but it means none of them would go to jail. Governments of the day did not do this either.
  - AdamN 3y ago
    Seems like those investigators should be the target of public prosecution
  - nullc 3y ago
    > but the Post Office was allowed to bring private prosecutions, As is everyone in the UK.
verisimi 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240111130315/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/world/europe/uk-itv-mr-bates-vs-post-office.html/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240111130315/https://www.nytim...
jmull 3y ago
I think what a lot of people who don't do software development don't understand is that the majority of software is developed like this: - Weeks, months, or years of being incomplete and full of bugs. Gaps are filled and bugs fixed continuously, but new bugs are being introduced all the time. - At the end -- where the end is a predetermined date and not based on the state of the software -- the software is deemed good enough and put into production So most software is just barely working, at best, and full of gaps, issues, and bugs, both known and unknown. This scandal is a case of egregious lack of leadership, both at the post office and at Fujitsu. But it was also enabled by a belief in the reliability and credibility of IT systems, which is profoundly undeserved and inaccurate.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > But it was also enabled by a belief in the reliability and credibility of IT systems, which is profoundly undeserved and inaccurate I don't think this is a real thing. The individual system was vouched for by senior people. That's why it wasn't questioned any further.
  - Zhyl 3y ago
    Yes, because they believed in the infallibility of the software in the first instance. It was only subsequently that that believe changed to outright lying to cover their own backs.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      I really don't think you can assume that. Other humans will have told them that it was good.
      - Zhyl 3y ago
        I can assume that a wider and deeper understanding of how software works would have meant that the investigations would have demanded a more thorough accounting of how the software worked, evidence provided by the system that it's calculations were correct (an audit trail) and that these questions would be asked at every juncture whenever the issue was raised to a new body or party. As can be seen by following the story, this wasn't the case. The only evidence provided in criminal cases was essentially a witness statement saying that the system was working correctly and that was the end of it.
verisimi 3y ago
> All this has left an intriguing question: how has a TV show achieved in one week more than investigative journalists and politicians in more than a decade? My answer is that information can easily be buried by the media, courts, politicians. The purpose of media is to guide not inform - there is nothing natural about the news. The more interesting question in my mind, is why is this news now? It can't be that a genuine issue has filtered into the public consciousness via a dramatised TV show. Is it that the show and surrounding dreams is intended as a distraction? Is something in the drama 'reframing' reality? Perhaps it is intended to show how 'the justice system may be slow, but still calls people to account' ie an attempt to shore up faith in our system? Is the loss of someone's CBE (an honour) intended to be a lightning rod to channel popular discontent down a cul de sac? This event requires a media analysis.
- blitzar 3y ago
  > It can't be that a genuine issue has filtered into the public consciousness via a dramatised TV show. Except that is exactly what has happened. The story was widely reported, nobody cared. Footballers wives fighting in court, people care. The royals, people care. Celebrities eating bugs in the jungle, people care. If a person affected was on love island or dancing with the stars, people would have cared.
- tgv 3y ago
  > This event requires a media analysis. This event requires a rethinking of responsabilities and the power structure in the Post Office (but probably in all external goal oriented orgs). What a media analysis, in all its sloppiness, will do is make people believe there's a format for exposing scandals that can be used at will.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    The point is that much was obvious for years. This particular scandal has been widely and publically reported on for years and years. Why did it take making a TV show for action to happen? That part goes way beyond the post office itself.
- 3y ago
Zhyl 3y ago
It's interesting seeing a TV drama (and, more widely, a great miscarriage of justice turned into a public outcry) centred around an IT issue. This should be something for the HN community to take note, as this scandal is for Fujitsu the chickens coming home to roost for an issue that started in 1999. We as software developers, the maker of the tools and the facilitators of change and advancement have responsibilities, and those responsibilities can have wide reaching consequences. We saw in Myanmar that not understanding the locality and not having adequate moderation can have consequences, we see with this case that absolute faith in a system can be damaging and mixed with other factors (such as the UK's obscure Draconian laws around the mail service being able to prosecute people) can be catastrophic. So, friends, when you are approaching a deadline and you feel as though you need to ship even though you know the product is bug riddled, just take a moment to write some extra tests or to document the shortcomings more thoroughly. Someone you don't know may be depending on it.
- blitzar 3y ago
  So, friends, when asked if 1 + 1 = 472, don't say "of course it does, you filthy thieving criminal" because you don't want to admit you or someone else working on your innovative reimagined system maybe possibly made a mistake.
  - splatzone 3y ago
    What point did you think GP was trying to make? I'm confused by your comment
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - Snow_Falls 3y ago
      The software this scandal centres around was known for recording incorrect numbers. Numbers that were then relied upon to accuse postal employees of theft. blitzsr is saying that you should be prepares to speak up when your software is fucking up. Essentially a more consise way of saying what zhyl did.
insickness 3y ago
The show is well-made and worth watching. I enjoyed it.
- dom96 3y ago
  Agreed, it's highly recommended if even for its great cinematography of Wales (in sunshine).
  - jimeecee 3y ago
    And this is the real reason it took so long for this program to be made. If they hadn't insisted on it being sunny, filming could have completed years ago.
    - who-shot-jr 3y ago
      lol
amiga386 3y ago
Part of the problem is that techy people, or justice-minded people, love the detail of just how awful something is. I've been boring my friends to death for years over this scandal. By comparison, this drama was only a few hours long, was aired while people were still in a holiday/relaxing mood after Xmas and New Year, and spun a compelling narrative about the people and communities affected. It had much clearer "goodies" and "baddies" (without being unfair). So it deserves credit in reigniting interest in the scandal.
- amiga386 3y ago
  Oh, and as a bonus for techy people: 1. Here's a quote from a 2001 (yes, 23 years ago) report by Fujitsu/ICL into how badly developed their Horizon system was: https://archive.is/MFtZC https://archive.is/MFtZC https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-11/FUJ00080690%20Report%20on%20the%20EPOSS%20PinICL%20Task%20Force%2014052001.pdf https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/fi... > Although parts of the EPOSS code are well written, significant sections are a combination of poor technical design, bad programming and ill-though out bug fixes. The negative impact of these factors will continue and spread as long as the PINICL fixing culture continues. This is partly due to the nature/size of the bug-fixing task and partly due to the quality and professionalism of certain individuals within the team. The problem is probably best illustrated [by] examples: > Example 1: This extract from EPOSSCore.dll has been written to reverse the sign of a number and is equivalent to the command d=-d Public Function ReverseSign(d) If d < 0 Then d = Abs(d) Else d = d - (d * 2) End If ReverseSign = d End Function > Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary mathematics or the most basic rules of programming. 2. Here are the juicy details about the overall architecture: https://archive.is/5Inru https://archive.is/5Inru > The Fujitsu-designed Epos software on the PCs was written onto an off-the-shelf system called Riposte. > Our source said the big flaw in Horizon was the way data was being written to Riposte.“Riposte wasn’t really a database, it was a messaging system based on an XML structure where you write messages down into the message store, and then Riposte took care of replicating them,” he said. “The first thing that you should always do with a system like that is design and agree a data dictionary and a message library repository, basically to say: these are the messages that are allowed to be written to the message store and they all provide the following function. > “You should also have a layer of software that lies on top of the message store that checks that any application above it which is trying to write a message, conforms to the agreed data dictionary. Otherwise, you can just write freestyle to the message store, which is what they were doing. There was no application interface in there, no agreed data catalogue or anything.” > Computer Weekly also spoke to a former Fujitsu employee who worked in the Horizon Service Support Centre from 2001. The support engineer – who also wants to remain anonymous – recognised this new description of Horizon’s badly built message store, adding: “Our job was to fix these problems as they arose. We all knew the code wasn’t fit for purpose and needed rewriting. The data dictionary was still being added to when I got there.” > For the first 10 years of Horizon’s existence, transaction and account data was stored on terminals in each branch before being uploaded to a central database via ISDN. Our source says this part of the system simply did not work. > “The cash account was a piece of software that sat on the counter NT box, asleep all day,” he said. “At the end of the day, or a particular point in the day, it came to life, and it ran through the message store from the point it last finished. It started at a watermark from yesterday and combed through every transaction in the message store, up until the next watermark. > “A lot of the messages in there were nonsense, because there was no data dictionary, there was no API that enforced message integrity. The contents of the message were freehand, you could write whatever you wanted in the code, and everybody did it differently. And then, when you came back three weeks later, you could write it differently again.” He gave an example of a message stored previously when a customer bought a stamp. It was feasible that a new message for buying a stamp weeks later could be slightly different. > “When the cash count came along, it found a message it was not expecting and either ignored it, tripped up, or added something it shouldn’t be adding,” he said.
dom96 3y ago
The fact that it took a TV Show to make this blow up as much as it did really speaks to the state of the UK (and possibly other countries too). I remember hearing about this a few years ago, I remember being outraged by it, but what could I have done? Why did the people who are meant to be our leaders not do anything? There are still other scandals out there that aren't getting the recognition they deserve (Infected Blood Scandal[1] being a big one but I'm sure there are others I'm not even aware of). So what can we do to ensure our politicians empower these campaigners instead of extinguishing them? 1 - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/10/infected-blood-scandal-victims-families-call-for-action-amid-post-office-injustice https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/10/infected-blo...
- jaggs 3y ago
  Great question. We're talking about systemic 'deliberate avoidance' with so many of these mistakes. How can we legislate to make sure there are penalties for this kind of malicious inaction? Government's also have to take a huge proportion of the blame.
- jackbridger 3y ago
  Agree. The politician's incentives don't seem very aligned at the moment. Also, feel like there are some shocking things going on with the water companies.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  > Why did the people who are meant to be our leaders not do anything? This is by design. A representative democracy is not intended to do what the people want. The representatives know the people are ignorant, obedient, comfortable, and scared. So the people just stand there mouths agape while the representatives do (or not do) whatever they want. The only consequence comes from other representatives. No representative fears the people. They're sheep.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 3y ago
midasuni 3y ago
A worrying spin-off from this is the constitutional change. Allowing Parliament to overturn a decision by the courts is unprecedented and a worrying change.
- blitzar 3y ago
  Prior art; Alan Turing law, Policing and Crime Act 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing_law Although, I don't see why the courts themselves could not overturn all cases that included evidence from the accounting system in question.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    The appeal courts in the UK hate overturning decisions of lower courts; you have to have a pretty rock-solid cased to get to appeal. I'm not aware of an appeal court ever overturning a whole class of convictions. I can imagine an appeal court ruling that some accounting system produced unreliable evidence; but each affected case would then probably have to go to appeal.
- Snow_Falls 3y ago
  We don't have a constitution, you mean a change of legal precedent. I agree that's its and awful precedent to set. But it's already been done with Parliament declaring Rwanda safe, changing convictions doesn't seem so beyond the pale. I'm honestly not sure what else to do about it though. The sheer scale of incompetence and cover up in the post office and the software company will likely take years to sort through. Can the victims really wait that long? What is the alternative? Having everyone convicted file an appeal? After everything they've already gone through? Frankly, just wiping the slate clean and getting rid of all the convictions seem like the good move to me.
  - VBprogrammer 3y ago
    > We don't have a constitution We don't have a written constitution. The sum of legal presidents, procedures and conventions is our constitution.
cheekibreeki2 3y ago
I can't believe they ruined so many lives.
notRobot 3y ago
Why isn't more software just... made good? I understand that often it's because the devs are underpaid, but is that the case everytime this happens? I get the impression (from living in this world and using a lot of software) that there are plenty of devs out there who just don't care enough about their craft to do good work, and that makes me very sad.
- codeulike 3y ago
  Why isn't more software just... made good? Because you can make almost as much money making it badly as you can making it properly. Especially in 1998. And especially with huge government contracts. In fact with huge government contracts in the 1990s you could make more money doing it badly than you could doing it properly. Because if you quoted the price it would have taken to do it properly, the government would buy it from your competitor who was quoting the price to do it badly. Eventually crap project goes live once government has paid 4x the original estimate for it (because its better for everyone involved to pretend its not crap) and the company goes on to use that 'success' to bid for their next project.
- cromulent 3y ago
  Such a good question. Don't blame the developers too quickly. In most industries you need to actually make or do good stuff to have a good career. In the software industry you can (badly) manage failed projects, or lead the development of poor software products, or run internal fiefdoms that make the development of good software harder, and still have a stellar career.
- Verdex 3y ago
  The rich young ruler approached Jesus and asked him what he had to do in order to inherit eternal life. And in a perplexing response Jesus begins to answer him. "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone." Software is neither good nor bad. It's run in a box of sand, and it's a minor miracle that humanity has found a way to make a box of sand do anything at all, let alone the digital empire that we have built. Good software isn't even describable. "Well, it should be correct." Okay, well, if good software is correct software, then why didn't you use that word to begin with? But what do you mean by 'correct'? Any definition you give will have edge cases that you didn't think of. Your resolutions will self contradict. And when the whole thing is deployed we'll discover that the assumptions of what correct means do not exist in physical reality; our house of cards painstakingly constructed with insane attention to detail collapses into ash. Jesus then goes onto to tell the rich young ruler to follow the second half of the 10 commandments. ~Yeah, I've been doing that since forever.~ One thing he lacked, though. He was to sell all his possessions and follow Jesus. This is not a rebuke. Do not stop asking for good software. It should be your demand; it is what we all deserve. But good software isn't a checklist of rules. It is not a simple thing to ask for. It is a lifelong journey where the destination is to get further than those who have come before. Good software is a limit as our striving tends to infinity.
codeulike 3y ago
Actual VB6 code sample from Horizon, taken from a code review document from 1998 that became part of the recent inquiry: Public Function ReverseSign(d) If d < 0 Then d = Abs(d) Else d = d - (d * 2) End If ReverseSign = d End Function Source: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/fuj00080690-report-eposs-pinicl-task-force https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/fuj0008... See page 17 onwards
- mckn1ght 3y ago
  First thought: bounds checking. What happens if d = INT_MAX / 2 + 1 ? Second thought: good job posting this, now it will be accepted into the corpus for GPT5
- Closi 3y ago
  This is amazing! Didn't realise parts of the code was available. If anyone was in any doubt, VBA6 does support: number = -number
  - charonn0 3y ago
    > number = -number They actually point this out when introducing the code snippet in the report. And then after the snippet: >> Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary mathematics of the most basic rules of computer programming.
    - TwoHeadedBeast 3y ago
      I'd like to say this code is bad, but it's nothing compared with what I put up with on a daily basis.
- codeulike 3y ago
  From the published details I've been trying to work out the architecture. The 'server' piece seems to be based around an XML message store (hey it was the 90s dont forget, XML was the big new thing) called Riposte build by Escher Group. There were some touchscreen EPOSS terminals for the post offices - these may also have been part of the Riposte system. Then there was a bunch of other stuff built around that and written in VB6 (which for the time was a reasonable choice unless you wanted to go Java or C++) running on NT workstations. Syncronisations from the thousands of post offices to the central server seemed to be via scheduled programs that picked up local message files (probably xml) and sent them to the central server over ISDN lines. Centrally there was something called the 'cash account' which pulled in those messages and (I guess?) added them to the riposte xml message database. As mentioned in the witness statements, they had no agreed data dictionary or schema for all the XML stuff so no centrally agreed scheme of how to represent all the different messages. So somewhere something was probably written to 'transalte' all these different messages into some nominally agreed standard.
pfdietz 3y ago
[flagged]
AdamN 3y ago
Don't focus on the IT/software stuff - it's missing the forest for the trees. Some people really do need to go to jail, and it's the people at Fujitsu, the Post Office, and the prosecutors offices who were involved and negligent. They weren't all negligent but some of them were and it needs more than a civil investigation.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  I think the majority of the blame should be on the higher ups at the Post Office as they weren't so much negligent as being malicious. Fujitsu were more likely incompetent, but they weren't the ones who prosecuted the sub postmasters and perjured themselves. There definitely needs to be some heads rolling for perverting the course of justice if nothing else. I'm surprised that the court system is happy with the Post Office using them as their attack dogs.
  - amiga386 3y ago
    Currently, two somewhat lowly staff engineers of Fujitsu are being prosecuted for perjury: Gareth Jenkins and Anne Chambers. Why specifically them? Because both gave evidence in Post Office prosecutions of SPMs that Horizon did not have flaws, then in the Bates v Post Office Ltd case, their support ticket logs (PEAKs) were finally included in evidence. These work tickets show both of them acknowledging bugs that create false accounts, and manually correcting data in the records and audit logs to balance it out... and also sometimes getting the "fix" wrong without noticing... and noting that they saw no need to inform the SPMs. https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html The very things SPMs said were happening and the Post Office and Fujitsu denied. They fucking knew it. They testified that the things they did day-in, day-out never happened, and SPMs were convicted and sometimes imprisoned as a result. Obviously there are a lot more people at both Fujitsu and the Post Office that need to see justice, but this is a start.
    - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      The more I learn about the scandal, the more I think that everyone involved in it from the Post Office and Fujitsu should be prosecuted as taking part in a criminal conspiracy to pervert the court of justice.
dougSF70 3y ago
Fujitsu execs that released this buggy software causing untold harm need to be brought to justice.
- dougSF70 3y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/15/fujitsu-questions-for-post-office-it-firm-faces-mps-inquiry https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/15/fujitsu-que...
InCityDreams 3y ago
The very hard work of https://private-eye.co.uk/ https://private-eye.co.uk/ regarding these cases shouldn't go unmentioned.
- amiga386 3y ago
  https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-i...
benbojangles 3y ago
This scandal is just one of very few instances where a uk government department has been forced to backtrack, appologise, and compensate for life devastation. They literally get away with murder in departments such as DWP & HMRC.
asdefghyk 3y ago
I'm amazed, seems incompetence , starting with senior management and rippling down. I note any person could have reported this issue , by sending a few anonymous messages to several relevant people - starting with senior people and mentioning their responsibility's and casually mentioning a few facts that only a limited number internal people likely to know etc .... And if nothing happened "in a while" , send information to a wider circle of people As A Software test alysist for 20 Years, working in a company that was "bank like", where numerous transactions could involve large sums of money. When software changes where ready to go to production, There would be a audit of the testing. This would take at least a few DAYSs. The (government) customer would hire independent very experienced software engineers / testers. We would have a test system that mimicked the distributed production system. with all (100s) of software versions matching . We also had internal and external auditors . Our test plans . test cases , test data and test results would be examined. Some tests would need to be reproduced in the presence of a auditor. Or the auditor would ask for tests to be run using their provided data. We also had load testing, deployment testing, rollback tests etc. The software had to conform to certain international standards for security - so such remote access would not have been possible, in our case. If it had existed it would have been discovered through audits . Other measure s where taken in system , such as encrypted of messages and encrypted databases . Access was tightly controlled . Software developers could not deploy to prod. Lots other security controls to
- tauchunfall 3y ago
  I have the feeling that even a single capable software engineer from a bank (or any client) who is put into different teams of the contractor and reports back to the client, would already make a big difference. Does not replace testing at all, but would at least inform the client about possible problems, so they can stop the whole project early enough.
jmyeet 3y ago
If I go into a police station and file a police report saying you stole $50,000 from the Post Office branch you ran, one would hope that I'd also have to prove it. If I filed a civil complaint against you, I'd have to produce evidence. In both cases, if I lied by, for example, saying that I had evidence that I did not, I could and should be charged with a crime, in the very least making a false report and/or making a false statement to the court. Yet we let companies do this with IT systems all the time. Hertz famously accused people of stealing cars that they did not [1]. The same principle should apply: whoever OKed such a system should be charged with a crime. All these systems make the same mistake: they want to replace humans. If you want to do that, you should be on the hook legally for the results but really it shouldn't be allowed. It's completely fine if Hertz designed a system that flagged people for not returning cars (ie stealing them). That would get sent to a person. That person would review the information, check if it was an error or not and, if not, file a police report. That human would be responsible for maaking a false police report in the case of an error. Any errors could then be addressed as bugs with the systems provider. Likewise, for Horizon, by all means automate the review of financial records. Find what you think are fradulent transactions. That gets spit out to a report. That report may then be investigated by, say, a financial accounting firm who is responsible for determining the facts and, if necessary, taking legal action. You see how this version aids a person doing this job and the actual versions of these replaces the humans? A human can't necessarily review every transaction of the postal system so automating fraud detection makes sense. What doesn't make sense is allowing the systems provider and the government agencies that enabled this off the hook because of "bugs". [1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusation-stealing-cars-settlement https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
- nullc 3y ago
  Not to excuse the post office or the UK legal system-- but there are reasons your point has limitations. The subpostmasters were signing statements that their accounts were accurate, their charges were mostly related to these sorts of collateral lies rather than the theft. So in a uselessly pedantic and literal sense they often had performed the wrongful act they were accused of, though this ignores that they were more or less forced into it and sometimes explicitly told by tech support to do so. In specific cases the financially disabled and often unrepresented subpostmasters made legal errors. For example, instead of defending themselves by responding that the Horizon figures were inaccurate they defended themselves by saying they could prove they didn't take the funds from their own books. Essentially allowing the burden of proof to be reversed.
jevoten 3y ago
A relevant comment from an earlier thread on this topic: Interestingly the TV drama doesn't mention Adam Crozier, who was CEO of Royal Mail 2003-10. I wonder if this is at all related the fact that Crozier was also CEO of ITV 2010-2017, the company that made the TV drama? Hmmm. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38931500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38931500
ustad 3y ago
So yeah, when I was a youth around 1995 I wrote a Turbo Pascal application for my local post office in the the North of England. On the house, no payment - mainly to hang out in the back room and see the world go by. The application tallied up the days ins and outs and then printed the results on dot matrix printer which were used to help with the book keeping. The post master and mistress were very happy with it. Once they were invited to the post office headquarters in London for some award for their services and I tagged along for the trip. After some years I heard the post office shut down due to some financial scandal and the post master lost his job and was forced to become a taxi driver. Never found out the details until now. Blows my mind thinking how much money goes to people who don't actually do shit and actually hold back others trying to earn some peanuts. I remember fondly those times, especially watching the post mistress hypnotised with my built-in psychedelic screensaver. She was well impressed.
- tauchunfall 3y ago
  Of course, I have to take this with a grain of salt, can't verify it, but what a story. Post office should have used your Turbo Pascal-based system, the post master would not be forced to become a taxi driver. This reminds me I always wanted to build a fictional cashier system with terminal interface in ncurses, after I saw these still used in early 2000s in DIY stores. Maybe a local post office system would also a great side project for the weekends.
nadermx 3y ago
According to private eye, despite this, there where still over 50 convictions not overturned on appeal.
shantnutiwari 3y ago
Sorry, it wasn't a "TV show" that brought this to life. Private Eye have been writing about it for 10+ years, the BBC and other papers have covered this issue multiple times in the last 3-4 years that I remember. So it's not like the stupid people of Britain woke up one day, turned on the TV and said "Golly gee, post office scandal. I never knew!" Sounds like a puff PR piece for the TV drama?

200 points by infotainment 3y ago

The strange fact is that the Post Office runs its own court system, I take it many people didn't realise this. Having worked through the thicket of rules for FCA regulation I am gob-smacked how far things went.

switch007 3y ago
What exactly is meant by "its own court system"? Nothing is coming up when I Google.
amiga386 3y ago
It's not that it runs its own court system, but the Post Office was allowed to bring private prosecutions, which is to say a private individual or organization can bring criminal law cases to court as well as vastly more common civil law cases. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_Kin... What the Post Office did have, though, is its own centuries-old investigation team, and much of the scandal hinges on the fact that these investigators are employees of the Post Office and likely knew the accounting system was faulty, and those faults could explain supposed losses, but deliberately disregarded that in bullying and prosecuting subpostmasters into accepting liability for phantom losses.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  Also, as well as in practice exercising control over the Post Office as its owners, the Government is responsible for the Crown Prosecutors, the people who usually carry out criminal prosecutions. For a long time now Crown Prosecutors have been able to seize any existing criminal cases (prosecuted by somebody else) in order to terminate it. They could have stepped in, taken over the case, said "This seems like bullshit" and terminated the prosecution. That's still awful for the postmasters, who have faced a threat of prosecution, but it means none of them would go to jail. Governments of the day did not do this either.
- AdamN 3y ago
  Seems like those investigators should be the target of public prosecution
- nullc 3y ago
  > but the Post Office was allowed to bring private prosecutions, As is everyone in the UK.

verisimi 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240111130315/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/world/europe/uk-itv-mr-bates-vs-post-office.html/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240111130315/https://www.nytim...

jmull 3y ago

I think what a lot of people who don't do software development don't understand is that the majority of software is developed like this: - Weeks, months, or years of being incomplete and full of bugs. Gaps are filled and bugs fixed continuously, but new bugs are being introduced all the time. - At the end -- where the end is a predetermined date and not based on the state of the software -- the software is deemed good enough and put into production So most software is just barely working, at best, and full of gaps, issues, and bugs, both known and unknown. This scandal is a case of egregious lack of leadership, both at the post office and at Fujitsu. But it was also enabled by a belief in the reliability and credibility of IT systems, which is profoundly undeserved and inaccurate.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> But it was also enabled by a belief in the reliability and credibility of IT systems, which is profoundly undeserved and inaccurate I don't think this is a real thing. The individual system was vouched for by senior people. That's why it wasn't questioned any further.
- Zhyl 3y ago
  Yes, because they believed in the infallibility of the software in the first instance. It was only subsequently that that believe changed to outright lying to cover their own backs.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I really don't think you can assume that. Other humans will have told them that it was good.
    - Zhyl 3y ago
      I can assume that a wider and deeper understanding of how software works would have meant that the investigations would have demanded a more thorough accounting of how the software worked, evidence provided by the system that it's calculations were correct (an audit trail) and that these questions would be asked at every juncture whenever the issue was raised to a new body or party. As can be seen by following the story, this wasn't the case. The only evidence provided in criminal cases was essentially a witness statement saying that the system was working correctly and that was the end of it.

verisimi 3y ago

> All this has left an intriguing question: how has a TV show achieved in one week more than investigative journalists and politicians in more than a decade? My answer is that information can easily be buried by the media, courts, politicians. The purpose of media is to guide not inform - there is nothing natural about the news. The more interesting question in my mind, is why is this news now? It can't be that a genuine issue has filtered into the public consciousness via a dramatised TV show. Is it that the show and surrounding dreams is intended as a distraction? Is something in the drama 'reframing' reality? Perhaps it is intended to show how 'the justice system may be slow, but still calls people to account' ie an attempt to shore up faith in our system? Is the loss of someone's CBE (an honour) intended to be a lightning rod to channel popular discontent down a cul de sac? This event requires a media analysis.

blitzar 3y ago
> It can't be that a genuine issue has filtered into the public consciousness via a dramatised TV show. Except that is exactly what has happened. The story was widely reported, nobody cared. Footballers wives fighting in court, people care. The royals, people care. Celebrities eating bugs in the jungle, people care. If a person affected was on love island or dancing with the stars, people would have cared.
tgv 3y ago
> This event requires a media analysis. This event requires a rethinking of responsabilities and the power structure in the Post Office (but probably in all external goal oriented orgs). What a media analysis, in all its sloppiness, will do is make people believe there's a format for exposing scandals that can be used at will.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  The point is that much was obvious for years. This particular scandal has been widely and publically reported on for years and years. Why did it take making a TV show for action to happen? That part goes way beyond the post office itself.
3y ago

Zhyl 3y ago

It's interesting seeing a TV drama (and, more widely, a great miscarriage of justice turned into a public outcry) centred around an IT issue. This should be something for the HN community to take note, as this scandal is for Fujitsu the chickens coming home to roost for an issue that started in 1999. We as software developers, the maker of the tools and the facilitators of change and advancement have responsibilities, and those responsibilities can have wide reaching consequences. We saw in Myanmar that not understanding the locality and not having adequate moderation can have consequences, we see with this case that absolute faith in a system can be damaging and mixed with other factors (such as the UK's obscure Draconian laws around the mail service being able to prosecute people) can be catastrophic. So, friends, when you are approaching a deadline and you feel as though you need to ship even though you know the product is bug riddled, just take a moment to write some extra tests or to document the shortcomings more thoroughly. Someone you don't know may be depending on it.

blitzar 3y ago
So, friends, when asked if 1 + 1 = 472, don't say "of course it does, you filthy thieving criminal" because you don't want to admit you or someone else working on your innovative reimagined system maybe possibly made a mistake.
- splatzone 3y ago
  What point did you think GP was trying to make? I'm confused by your comment
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Snow_Falls 3y ago
    The software this scandal centres around was known for recording incorrect numbers. Numbers that were then relied upon to accuse postal employees of theft. blitzsr is saying that you should be prepares to speak up when your software is fucking up. Essentially a more consise way of saying what zhyl did.

insickness 3y ago

The show is well-made and worth watching. I enjoyed it.

dom96 3y ago
Agreed, it's highly recommended if even for its great cinematography of Wales (in sunshine).
- jimeecee 3y ago
  And this is the real reason it took so long for this program to be made. If they hadn't insisted on it being sunny, filming could have completed years ago.
  - who-shot-jr 3y ago
    lol

amiga386 3y ago

Part of the problem is that techy people, or justice-minded people, love the detail of just how awful something is. I've been boring my friends to death for years over this scandal. By comparison, this drama was only a few hours long, was aired while people were still in a holiday/relaxing mood after Xmas and New Year, and spun a compelling narrative about the people and communities affected. It had much clearer "goodies" and "baddies" (without being unfair). So it deserves credit in reigniting interest in the scandal.

amiga386 3y ago
Oh, and as a bonus for techy people: 1. Here's a quote from a 2001 (yes, 23 years ago) report by Fujitsu/ICL into how badly developed their Horizon system was: https://archive.is/MFtZC https://archive.is/MFtZC https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-11/FUJ00080690%20Report%20on%20the%20EPOSS%20PinICL%20Task%20Force%2014052001.pdf https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/fi... > Although parts of the EPOSS code are well written, significant sections are a combination of poor technical design, bad programming and ill-though out bug fixes. The negative impact of these factors will continue and spread as long as the PINICL fixing culture continues. This is partly due to the nature/size of the bug-fixing task and partly due to the quality and professionalism of certain individuals within the team. The problem is probably best illustrated [by] examples: > Example 1: This extract from EPOSSCore.dll has been written to reverse the sign of a number and is equivalent to the command d=-d Public Function ReverseSign(d) If d < 0 Then d = Abs(d) Else d = d - (d * 2) End If ReverseSign = d End Function > Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary mathematics or the most basic rules of programming. 2. Here are the juicy details about the overall architecture: https://archive.is/5Inru https://archive.is/5Inru > The Fujitsu-designed Epos software on the PCs was written onto an off-the-shelf system called Riposte. > Our source said the big flaw in Horizon was the way data was being written to Riposte.“Riposte wasn’t really a database, it was a messaging system based on an XML structure where you write messages down into the message store, and then Riposte took care of replicating them,” he said. “The first thing that you should always do with a system like that is design and agree a data dictionary and a message library repository, basically to say: these are the messages that are allowed to be written to the message store and they all provide the following function. > “You should also have a layer of software that lies on top of the message store that checks that any application above it which is trying to write a message, conforms to the agreed data dictionary. Otherwise, you can just write freestyle to the message store, which is what they were doing. There was no application interface in there, no agreed data catalogue or anything.” > Computer Weekly also spoke to a former Fujitsu employee who worked in the Horizon Service Support Centre from 2001. The support engineer – who also wants to remain anonymous – recognised this new description of Horizon’s badly built message store, adding: “Our job was to fix these problems as they arose. We all knew the code wasn’t fit for purpose and needed rewriting. The data dictionary was still being added to when I got there.” > For the first 10 years of Horizon’s existence, transaction and account data was stored on terminals in each branch before being uploaded to a central database via ISDN. Our source says this part of the system simply did not work. > “The cash account was a piece of software that sat on the counter NT box, asleep all day,” he said. “At the end of the day, or a particular point in the day, it came to life, and it ran through the message store from the point it last finished. It started at a watermark from yesterday and combed through every transaction in the message store, up until the next watermark. > “A lot of the messages in there were nonsense, because there was no data dictionary, there was no API that enforced message integrity. The contents of the message were freehand, you could write whatever you wanted in the code, and everybody did it differently. And then, when you came back three weeks later, you could write it differently again.” He gave an example of a message stored previously when a customer bought a stamp. It was feasible that a new message for buying a stamp weeks later could be slightly different. > “When the cash count came along, it found a message it was not expecting and either ignored it, tripped up, or added something it shouldn’t be adding,” he said.

dom96 3y ago

The fact that it took a TV Show to make this blow up as much as it did really speaks to the state of the UK (and possibly other countries too). I remember hearing about this a few years ago, I remember being outraged by it, but what could I have done? Why did the people who are meant to be our leaders not do anything? There are still other scandals out there that aren't getting the recognition they deserve (Infected Blood Scandal[1] being a big one but I'm sure there are others I'm not even aware of). So what can we do to ensure our politicians empower these campaigners instead of extinguishing them? 1 - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/10/infected-blood-scandal-victims-families-call-for-action-amid-post-office-injustice https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/10/infected-blo...

jaggs 3y ago
Great question. We're talking about systemic 'deliberate avoidance' with so many of these mistakes. How can we legislate to make sure there are penalties for this kind of malicious inaction? Government's also have to take a huge proportion of the blame.
jackbridger 3y ago
Agree. The politician's incentives don't seem very aligned at the moment. Also, feel like there are some shocking things going on with the water companies.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
> Why did the people who are meant to be our leaders not do anything? This is by design. A representative democracy is not intended to do what the people want. The representatives know the people are ignorant, obedient, comfortable, and scared. So the people just stand there mouths agape while the representatives do (or not do) whatever they want. The only consequence comes from other representatives. No representative fears the people. They're sheep.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
3y ago

midasuni 3y ago

A worrying spin-off from this is the constitutional change. Allowing Parliament to overturn a decision by the courts is unprecedented and a worrying change.

blitzar 3y ago
Prior art; Alan Turing law, Policing and Crime Act 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing_law Although, I don't see why the courts themselves could not overturn all cases that included evidence from the accounting system in question.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  The appeal courts in the UK hate overturning decisions of lower courts; you have to have a pretty rock-solid cased to get to appeal. I'm not aware of an appeal court ever overturning a whole class of convictions. I can imagine an appeal court ruling that some accounting system produced unreliable evidence; but each affected case would then probably have to go to appeal.
Snow_Falls 3y ago
We don't have a constitution, you mean a change of legal precedent. I agree that's its and awful precedent to set. But it's already been done with Parliament declaring Rwanda safe, changing convictions doesn't seem so beyond the pale. I'm honestly not sure what else to do about it though. The sheer scale of incompetence and cover up in the post office and the software company will likely take years to sort through. Can the victims really wait that long? What is the alternative? Having everyone convicted file an appeal? After everything they've already gone through? Frankly, just wiping the slate clean and getting rid of all the convictions seem like the good move to me.
- VBprogrammer 3y ago
  > We don't have a constitution We don't have a written constitution. The sum of legal presidents, procedures and conventions is our constitution.

cheekibreeki2 3y ago

I can't believe they ruined so many lives.

notRobot 3y ago

Why isn't more software just... made good? I understand that often it's because the devs are underpaid, but is that the case everytime this happens? I get the impression (from living in this world and using a lot of software) that there are plenty of devs out there who just don't care enough about their craft to do good work, and that makes me very sad.

codeulike 3y ago
Why isn't more software just... made good? Because you can make almost as much money making it badly as you can making it properly. Especially in 1998. And especially with huge government contracts. In fact with huge government contracts in the 1990s you could make more money doing it badly than you could doing it properly. Because if you quoted the price it would have taken to do it properly, the government would buy it from your competitor who was quoting the price to do it badly. Eventually crap project goes live once government has paid 4x the original estimate for it (because its better for everyone involved to pretend its not crap) and the company goes on to use that 'success' to bid for their next project.
cromulent 3y ago
Such a good question. Don't blame the developers too quickly. In most industries you need to actually make or do good stuff to have a good career. In the software industry you can (badly) manage failed projects, or lead the development of poor software products, or run internal fiefdoms that make the development of good software harder, and still have a stellar career.
Verdex 3y ago
The rich young ruler approached Jesus and asked him what he had to do in order to inherit eternal life. And in a perplexing response Jesus begins to answer him. "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone." Software is neither good nor bad. It's run in a box of sand, and it's a minor miracle that humanity has found a way to make a box of sand do anything at all, let alone the digital empire that we have built. Good software isn't even describable. "Well, it should be correct." Okay, well, if good software is correct software, then why didn't you use that word to begin with? But what do you mean by 'correct'? Any definition you give will have edge cases that you didn't think of. Your resolutions will self contradict. And when the whole thing is deployed we'll discover that the assumptions of what correct means do not exist in physical reality; our house of cards painstakingly constructed with insane attention to detail collapses into ash. Jesus then goes onto to tell the rich young ruler to follow the second half of the 10 commandments. ~Yeah, I've been doing that since forever.~ One thing he lacked, though. He was to sell all his possessions and follow Jesus. This is not a rebuke. Do not stop asking for good software. It should be your demand; it is what we all deserve. But good software isn't a checklist of rules. It is not a simple thing to ask for. It is a lifelong journey where the destination is to get further than those who have come before. Good software is a limit as our striving tends to infinity.

codeulike 3y ago

Actual VB6 code sample from Horizon, taken from a code review document from 1998 that became part of the recent inquiry: Public Function ReverseSign(d) If d < 0 Then d = Abs(d) Else d = d - (d * 2) End If ReverseSign = d End Function Source: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/fuj00080690-report-eposs-pinicl-task-force https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/fuj0008... See page 17 onwards

mckn1ght 3y ago
First thought: bounds checking. What happens if d = INT_MAX / 2 + 1 ? Second thought: good job posting this, now it will be accepted into the corpus for GPT5
Closi 3y ago
This is amazing! Didn't realise parts of the code was available. If anyone was in any doubt, VBA6 does support: number = -number
- charonn0 3y ago
  > number = -number They actually point this out when introducing the code snippet in the report. And then after the snippet: >> Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary mathematics of the most basic rules of computer programming.
  - TwoHeadedBeast 3y ago
    I'd like to say this code is bad, but it's nothing compared with what I put up with on a daily basis.
codeulike 3y ago
From the published details I've been trying to work out the architecture. The 'server' piece seems to be based around an XML message store (hey it was the 90s dont forget, XML was the big new thing) called Riposte build by Escher Group. There were some touchscreen EPOSS terminals for the post offices - these may also have been part of the Riposte system. Then there was a bunch of other stuff built around that and written in VB6 (which for the time was a reasonable choice unless you wanted to go Java or C++) running on NT workstations. Syncronisations from the thousands of post offices to the central server seemed to be via scheduled programs that picked up local message files (probably xml) and sent them to the central server over ISDN lines. Centrally there was something called the 'cash account' which pulled in those messages and (I guess?) added them to the riposte xml message database. As mentioned in the witness statements, they had no agreed data dictionary or schema for all the XML stuff so no centrally agreed scheme of how to represent all the different messages. So somewhere something was probably written to 'transalte' all these different messages into some nominally agreed standard.

pfdietz 3y ago

[flagged]

AdamN 3y ago

Don't focus on the IT/software stuff - it's missing the forest for the trees. Some people really do need to go to jail, and it's the people at Fujitsu, the Post Office, and the prosecutors offices who were involved and negligent. They weren't all negligent but some of them were and it needs more than a civil investigation.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
I think the majority of the blame should be on the higher ups at the Post Office as they weren't so much negligent as being malicious. Fujitsu were more likely incompetent, but they weren't the ones who prosecuted the sub postmasters and perjured themselves. There definitely needs to be some heads rolling for perverting the course of justice if nothing else. I'm surprised that the court system is happy with the Post Office using them as their attack dogs.
- amiga386 3y ago
  Currently, two somewhat lowly staff engineers of Fujitsu are being prosecuted for perjury: Gareth Jenkins and Anne Chambers. Why specifically them? Because both gave evidence in Post Office prosecutions of SPMs that Horizon did not have flaws, then in the Bates v Post Office Ltd case, their support ticket logs (PEAKs) were finally included in evidence. These work tickets show both of them acknowledging bugs that create false accounts, and manually correcting data in the records and audit logs to balance it out... and also sometimes getting the "fix" wrong without noticing... and noting that they saw no need to inform the SPMs. https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html The very things SPMs said were happening and the Post Office and Fujitsu denied. They fucking knew it. They testified that the things they did day-in, day-out never happened, and SPMs were convicted and sometimes imprisoned as a result. Obviously there are a lot more people at both Fujitsu and the Post Office that need to see justice, but this is a start.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    The more I learn about the scandal, the more I think that everyone involved in it from the Post Office and Fujitsu should be prosecuted as taking part in a criminal conspiracy to pervert the court of justice.

dougSF70 3y ago

Fujitsu execs that released this buggy software causing untold harm need to be brought to justice.

dougSF70 3y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/15/fujitsu-questions-for-post-office-it-firm-faces-mps-inquiry https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/15/fujitsu-que...

InCityDreams 3y ago

The very hard work of https://private-eye.co.uk/ https://private-eye.co.uk/ regarding these cases shouldn't go unmentioned.

amiga386 3y ago
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-i...

benbojangles 3y ago

This scandal is just one of very few instances where a uk government department has been forced to backtrack, appologise, and compensate for life devastation. They literally get away with murder in departments such as DWP & HMRC.

asdefghyk 3y ago

I'm amazed, seems incompetence , starting with senior management and rippling down. I note any person could have reported this issue , by sending a few anonymous messages to several relevant people - starting with senior people and mentioning their responsibility's and casually mentioning a few facts that only a limited number internal people likely to know etc .... And if nothing happened "in a while" , send information to a wider circle of people As A Software test alysist for 20 Years, working in a company that was "bank like", where numerous transactions could involve large sums of money. When software changes where ready to go to production, There would be a audit of the testing. This would take at least a few DAYSs. The (government) customer would hire independent very experienced software engineers / testers. We would have a test system that mimicked the distributed production system. with all (100s) of software versions matching . We also had internal and external auditors . Our test plans . test cases , test data and test results would be examined. Some tests would need to be reproduced in the presence of a auditor. Or the auditor would ask for tests to be run using their provided data. We also had load testing, deployment testing, rollback tests etc. The software had to conform to certain international standards for security - so such remote access would not have been possible, in our case. If it had existed it would have been discovered through audits . Other measure s where taken in system , such as encrypted of messages and encrypted databases . Access was tightly controlled . Software developers could not deploy to prod. Lots other security controls to

tauchunfall 3y ago
I have the feeling that even a single capable software engineer from a bank (or any client) who is put into different teams of the contractor and reports back to the client, would already make a big difference. Does not replace testing at all, but would at least inform the client about possible problems, so they can stop the whole project early enough.

jmyeet 3y ago

If I go into a police station and file a police report saying you stole $50,000 from the Post Office branch you ran, one would hope that I'd also have to prove it. If I filed a civil complaint against you, I'd have to produce evidence. In both cases, if I lied by, for example, saying that I had evidence that I did not, I could and should be charged with a crime, in the very least making a false report and/or making a false statement to the court. Yet we let companies do this with IT systems all the time. Hertz famously accused people of stealing cars that they did not [1]. The same principle should apply: whoever OKed such a system should be charged with a crime. All these systems make the same mistake: they want to replace humans. If you want to do that, you should be on the hook legally for the results but really it shouldn't be allowed. It's completely fine if Hertz designed a system that flagged people for not returning cars (ie stealing them). That would get sent to a person. That person would review the information, check if it was an error or not and, if not, file a police report. That human would be responsible for maaking a false police report in the case of an error. Any errors could then be addressed as bugs with the systems provider. Likewise, for Horizon, by all means automate the review of financial records. Find what you think are fradulent transactions. That gets spit out to a report. That report may then be investigated by, say, a financial accounting firm who is responsible for determining the facts and, if necessary, taking legal action. You see how this version aids a person doing this job and the actual versions of these replaces the humans? A human can't necessarily review every transaction of the postal system so automating fraud detection makes sense. What doesn't make sense is allowing the systems provider and the government agencies that enabled this off the hook because of "bugs". [1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusation-stealing-cars-settlement https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...

nullc 3y ago
Not to excuse the post office or the UK legal system-- but there are reasons your point has limitations. The subpostmasters were signing statements that their accounts were accurate, their charges were mostly related to these sorts of collateral lies rather than the theft. So in a uselessly pedantic and literal sense they often had performed the wrongful act they were accused of, though this ignores that they were more or less forced into it and sometimes explicitly told by tech support to do so. In specific cases the financially disabled and often unrepresented subpostmasters made legal errors. For example, instead of defending themselves by responding that the Horizon figures were inaccurate they defended themselves by saying they could prove they didn't take the funds from their own books. Essentially allowing the burden of proof to be reversed.

jevoten 3y ago

A relevant comment from an earlier thread on this topic: Interestingly the TV drama doesn't mention Adam Crozier, who was CEO of Royal Mail 2003-10. I wonder if this is at all related the fact that Crozier was also CEO of ITV 2010-2017, the company that made the TV drama? Hmmm. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38931500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38931500

ustad 3y ago

So yeah, when I was a youth around 1995 I wrote a Turbo Pascal application for my local post office in the the North of England. On the house, no payment - mainly to hang out in the back room and see the world go by. The application tallied up the days ins and outs and then printed the results on dot matrix printer which were used to help with the book keeping. The post master and mistress were very happy with it. Once they were invited to the post office headquarters in London for some award for their services and I tagged along for the trip. After some years I heard the post office shut down due to some financial scandal and the post master lost his job and was forced to become a taxi driver. Never found out the details until now. Blows my mind thinking how much money goes to people who don't actually do shit and actually hold back others trying to earn some peanuts. I remember fondly those times, especially watching the post mistress hypnotised with my built-in psychedelic screensaver. She was well impressed.

tauchunfall 3y ago
Of course, I have to take this with a grain of salt, can't verify it, but what a story. Post office should have used your Turbo Pascal-based system, the post master would not be forced to become a taxi driver. This reminds me I always wanted to build a fictional cashier system with terminal interface in ncurses, after I saw these still used in early 2000s in DIY stores. Maybe a local post office system would also a great side project for the weekends.

nadermx 3y ago

According to private eye, despite this, there where still over 50 convictions not overturned on appeal.

shantnutiwari 3y ago

Sorry, it wasn't a "TV show" that brought this to life. Private Eye have been writing about it for 10+ years, the BBC and other papers have covered this issue multiple times in the last 3-4 years that I remember. So it's not like the stupid people of Britain woke up one day, turned on the TV and said "Golly gee, post office scandal. I never knew!" Sounds like a puff PR piece for the TV drama?