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Post Office lied and threatened BBC over Fujitsu dev whistleblower

525 points by johndunne 3y ago

johndunne 3y ago
This Post Office scandal is currently ongoing in the UK. The Fujitsu developer in question confirmed what the Post Office was denying, that the Horizon software at the center of the scandal, had implemented methods for secretly editing accounts. Approx 700 postmasters (self-employed managers of Post Office branches) were held responsible when large amounts of cash appeared to have vanished from tills, resulting in prosecutions for fraud and theft. I know someone who was affected by this, who managed a now-closed Post Office branch here in Wakefield, UK and it was a life ruining ordeal for her. She was accused of stealing £1,000's in cash. I'm not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records for her branch, but the campaign the Post Office ran to smear any accusations of wrongfulness on the part of the Horizon software is shocking.
- ExoticPearTree 3y ago
  I loosely followed the discussion here on HN, but I don't see any mention of anyone from the Post Office being arrested/prosecuted/sentenced for this. It seems that some people there abused their power and need to cool down behind bars.
  - petesergeant 3y ago
    In fact, they had recently shortlisted the lady in charge of the PO at the time to be the Bishop of London, because of course they had.
    - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      That's Paula Vennells and she was awarded a CBE for her role in running the Post Office. However, there's just been a petition that garnered over 1.2 million signatures for her to be stripped of her CBE and in response, she has "promised" to return it. I, for one, don't believe her.
      - nebulous1 3y ago
        Apparently she can't "return" it, it has to be annulled by the British monarch.
        ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
        I hope Charlie does that then, but it depends on whether he cares enough about it. I think it would be fitting if a significant percentage of other people with CBEs started to return them with public statements about them not wanting to be associated with the likes of Paula Vennells.
        tialaramex 3y ago
        It's not really on Charlie, any more than he's the one making the lists. His mother wasn't like "OH, we should honor that Post Office lady, I like receiving letters and I bet she's somehow responsible for that". She just got a list with Paula's name on it, along with various crooks, financiers, consultants, political hacks and maybe the odd charity worker. Issuing Honours is something a Monarch does, but like declaring War or deciding what Laws should govern the country, they don't actually make decisions, that's a government problem. So long as the general public were barely aware of a problem, this could skate along as not important for years, but now lots of people are angry because they saw a TV show and for once when they said "Hey this is terrible!" instead of "It's just a TV show it's not real you idiots" those of us who were paying attention are like "Yes, so what are you going to do about it?" which as we've seen puts pressure on government to actually do something.
  - Tyrek 3y ago
    It's insane to me that most of the heat is being directed at Fujitsu. Sure, there's definitely some culpability there, but the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility. There's a lot weighing in on the multi-year investigation that (has been) ongoing, but I can't help but feel like they're waiting for the public furor to cool down before releasing anything.
    - toyg 3y ago
      > the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility. It really depends on what Fujitsu told which PO manager.
      - tialaramex 3y ago
        The Post Office also paid independent people to figure out where the problem is, and the answer was "Horizon is garbage, you can't rely on it". So, they fired those people. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974 This a pattern we've seen before 1. "We aren't wrong, you are too involved to make an impartial decision. We need somebody independent to investigate" 2. "The independent investigation has finished, but we need to properly digest their report, so we can't tell you what they said yet" 3. "We've now realised the independent investigation was inadequate, everybody who worked on it was incompetent and its findings are useless so we've destroyed the report. We declare ourselves exonerated, we were right all along". People tend to have this mistaken understanding of morality which assumes they're a good person and so therefore obviously what they did must be good (since they're a good person) and so they might need to uh, fix differences between the world as they've imagined it and the slightly less rosy reality. For example sure, you know that stabbing Sarah in the throat resulted in Sarah becoming dead, but you had to do that, because you're a good person and Sarah was going to tell the Police that you'd stolen $18.5M from the business. You didn't steal that money! Sure, yes, you took the money and maybe you technically shouldn't have done that, but you had a 100% sure strategy for playing Blackjack and recovering the $800 000 you lost last month, except that you got a bit confused and lost all of the $18.5M, but that's not theft, that's just a minor mistake you will be able to soon fix, if only Sarah doesn't tell these lies about stealing and get you arrested. So you had to, it wasn't murder, it was really self defence. You're a Good Person!
  - ExoticPearTree 3y ago
    To sort of answer my own question: - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/13/business/uk-post-office-fujitsu-horizon-scandal/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/13/business/uk-post-office-f... - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-quash-wrongful-post-office-convictions https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-quash-wrong... From the CNN article it seems like the police is going to get involved in this, so at least some good news for the people wrongfully prosecuted by the people charge of the Post Office.
- prof-dr-ir 3y ago
  > currently ongoing in the UK To be precise it is finally getting some of the attention it deserves, both from the public and from the government. The miscarriages of justice date from 1999 until 2015, and the high court ruling (about the software being faulty) that finally stopped the flow of convictions dates from 2019, almost five years ago. Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable. If that delay sounds absolutely bonkers to you then yes, that is what everyone else thinks as well.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    > Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable. Even crazier. The Post Office just recently lowered(!) the amount of money they allocated for compensations: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67784706 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67784706 They basically allocated a pot of money to pay the people they have harmed off. But these people had to actively go out and request their conviction to be overturned. Which of course many people were reluctant to do, since it means they would be upturning their life again, and going to court and finding lawyers and etc. They understandably have very little trust in the system. So Post Office just shrugged and decided they don't need to keep that much money around.
    - scott_w 3y ago
      > Even crazier. The Post Office just recently lowered(!) the amount of money It's even worse: they're still fighting hard against the appeals, heaping more misery on the people trying to turn their lives around!
      - miohtama 3y ago
        Sounds like lawyers are at the driving seat
        deleted 3y ago
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        3y ago
- dmix 3y ago
  Was it the post office itself that was dealing out charges? Like a post office inspector or whatever it's called? Or was it a normal police referral type thing?
  - benrutter 3y ago
    So apparently in UK law, the post office carry out their own investigations before taking charges to court (effectively replacing the police for internal post office charges) which sounds mental to me.
    - scott_w 3y ago
      David Davis mentioned this on News Agents. It seems like a holdover from when it was simply an arm of the state, where it made sense that it could just handle its own enforcement (since it carried the power of the Crown). It's absolutely something that needs to be stripped away in the modern day.
      - RuggedPineapple 3y ago
        It's not really a holdover because the UK allows ANYONE to bring a private prosecution. They just have the resources to do it at scale.
        JdeBP 3y ago
        There are legal arguments recounted in modern law textbooks that the whole idea of private prosecutions in England and Wales is a hold-over nowadays. The argument goes that since CPS decisions are subject to judicial review, the raison d'être for private prosecutions, that they allow for bad exercise of public prosecutorial discretion to be corrected by private persons, no longer exists, since the bad exercise of discretion now has another remedy. There is a fair groundswell of opinion, already driven by the bad reputation that the RSPCA, another prolific private prosecutor, has garnered, against private prosecutions. The Horizon thing only serves to fuel this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were not soon a proposal to do away with all private prosecutions on the back of these, despite the fact that Post Office Ltd and the RSPCA are institutional private prosecutors, and there's nowhere near as strong a case that personal private prosecutors are a problem.
- e40 3y ago
  Is there a podcast that talks about this?
  - mrw34 3y ago
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j/episodes/downloads https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j/episodes/downloads
  - supertron 3y ago
    I recommend The Guardian's podcast episodes covering this: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited-the-post-office-scandal-part-1-podcast https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited-the-post-office-scandal-part-2-podcast https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisi... Also some Private Eye podcast episodes: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/95 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/95
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  Welp, it'll be a fine, paid with other people's money and that's about it. Jail. The people who knowingly lied and sent people to prison need to be jailed. Not fined, not given a handie, not allowed to simply retire. J.A.I.L. They callously wrecked people's lives, including some that committed suicide.
  - maeil 3y ago
    Jail is not enough of a deterrent for the kind of enormous damage some of the involved have caused to society. For such large-scale, fully intentional, proven harm to society out of nothing but self-interest over a long period of time, stronger penalties than jail must be applied.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - pjc50 3y ago
      Such as? (Bearing in mind the ECHR)
      - deleted 3y ago
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      - sonicanatidae 3y ago
        Beating them with pool cues about the head and shoulders until their retinas detach would be a great consequence.
        rad_gruchalski 3y ago
        Would you sign up as an executor? Or would you rather have some other sadist to do it?
        sonicanatidae 3y ago
        You have no idea how fast I would jump to be the one with the pool cue. They would have to reconsider light being the fastest thing in the universe. It's not about sadism. It's about people getting deserved consequences for actions that greatly harmed a large number of people. Me? I'm just tired of watching it all. Treat people reasonably, and not be a Snidely Whiplash level of asshat or you get the pool cue.
- rlpb 3y ago
  > I'm not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records for her branch... From https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post-offices-horizon-system-failed-a-technical-breakdown https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post...: > One [bug]...would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for. The fact that this is even possible, apart from the sheer incompetency of a software design that permits it, means that no person can reasonably be accused of stealing cash if that accusation is based on records from this system.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    > would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record Consider the shittiest homegrown shopping portal probably doesn't do that and any commercial point of sale system absolutely won't do that either. The system has to be such a POS internally that no other vendor will take the liability for it. Reminds me of the Therac-25 that killed people. This thing probably killed more people than that.
    - notso411 3y ago
      This was custom software on custom hardware. Bit different from some web app with built in debounce.
      - rcxdude 3y ago
        So is basically any point of sale system. Realllllly not an excuse.
      - bloqs 3y ago
        The underlying paradigms are the same and it is inexcusable
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- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  My wife and I watched Mr Bates vs the Post Office, recently, it was one of those watches where you spend a lot of time yelling "How the fuck?! What the fuck?!" at the screen because the malice and dishonesty was so deliberate, so persistently maintained, lest the "brand" be sullied. I've been following this story for years, I know BBC's Panorama covered it in 2015, and was really surprised there wasn't more of an outcry in the UK about such blatant unfairness, guess technical cases like this are really helped by a TV drama with quality actors making it easily accessible to the general population, as soon as ITV aired the miniseries, the petition to have Vennall's CBE stripped jumped from 7K signatures to 700K+, and she said she would return it. (not the golden handshakes and "performance" bonuses though lol) I just can't believe that no-one has been held criminally accountable (yet) for the sheer (to quote the judges in the civil case) affront to justice that this represented - whether it was Post Office Limited (POL) misleading (well, lying to) the courts, or Fujitsu employees lying in prosecutions, or POL deliberately withholding evidence in their role as a prosecutor (wild that this power to prosecute as transferred from Royal Mail to the spun off entity), and some of the cynically legalistic games they played (like asking the judge to recuse himself for being biased against them, to further delay the outcome of the civil suit). And the crap they pulled with the Second Sight independent analysis that they commissioned themselves... I was just reading the Clarke Advice(s), and god-damn, I can't see how any former POL executives can claim "we honestly believed all that stuff we said in court, honest", after their own goddamn independent legal advice told them "stop these prosecutions, like now, your expert witness is full of shit" The 2nd Clarke Advice is a great read too, basically "STOP TRYING TO HIDE EVIDENCE, JESUS CHRIST". Oh, and some of the code that turned up from Horizon in an internal Fujitsus report is egregiously bad (how do I turn x into -x or -x into x? What's -(-x)? nevermind, I got this), from what I've read, the team that wrote Fujitsus was considered low skilled and mocked by other groups within Fujitsu as basically a group of clowns merely lacking a circus. Clarke Advice 1: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Clarke-advice-re-Jenkins.pdf https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/... Clarke Advice 2: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/20130802-Clarke-advice-re-shredding-1.pdf https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/... Fujitsu report: 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... Discussion of recusal application by Court of Appeal: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/assets/recusal_judgment.pdf https://taxpolicy.org.uk/assets/recusal_judgment.pdf
- DebtDeflation 3y ago
  >implemented methods for secretly editing accounts. >not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records It seems to me that determining whether this was a bug or a deliberate backdoor that allowed someone connected to Fujitsu to change account values should have been one of the first priorities of the investigation. The CNN article I read before the BBC article didn't even mention this, it seemed to just imply that this was all a mistake or at worst the government/Fujitsu trying to coverup the fact that the software was shoddy.
- hmottestad 3y ago
  I wonder if anyone thought that it seemed a bit far fetched for 100 postmasters to all steal money. Then when it was 200, it must seem doubly far fetched. Once 500 postmasters were caught "stealing" money, wouldn't someone wonder how they managed to hire 500 dishonest people. Typically when you catch one person you always wonder how many got away with it, so they catch 500 then there must be 5000 or 50 000 postmasters that were stealing without getting caught. How many post offices are there really in the UK?
- ddmf 3y ago
  It's absolutely disgusting, and it may also allow a murder to go free (or someone incorrectly jailed for murder if you believe them). Also, strange seeing my hometown mentioned on here!
rich_sasha 3y ago
If this scandal was about incompetence only, it would be outrageous. But this was at least a deliberate, criminal cover up at the expense of hundreds of innocent people, maybe worse, implemented with tools intended for fighting serious crime. It seems unbelievable that this could happen in a civilized country.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  It does shatter the illusion somewhat.
- 127361 3y ago
  They had Operation Ore in the early 2000s, thousands of innocent people were arrested and it resulted in 44 suicides. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/apr/26/comment.society https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/apr/26/comment.s... https://insidetime.org/newsround/massive-miscarriage-of-justice/ https://insidetime.org/newsround/massive-miscarriage-of-just...
  - gadders 3y ago
    And the Tom Watson delusion: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-64057457 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-640...
  - karlzt 3y ago
    That article says 39 suicides and wikipedia says 33.
- grumpyprole 3y ago
  It also remains to be seen whether there will ever be any accountability. So far there has only been the promise to hand back a CBE.
  - alexriddle 3y ago
    Which isn't even legally permissible, there is no way to 'give it back' (although you could stop using the title) - it can only be taken from you, which has to be done by the king on recommendation of the prime minister.
Zenst 3y ago
I can believe this as going thru something along the same lines with my housing association and met police, and it is shocking how many people who focus upon being seen to do a job and lie to cover up their mistakes have grown over the past few decades in the UK. I shudder at how many scandals never come to light as the process to clear things up and get the truth out is an uphill battle. Oh and my local MP is Ed Davey, who is deeply linked to this PO scandal, though in fairness, he does seem to be singled out over all the others who did less on their watch. I somehow wonder if society is on a path of race to the bottom at times and amazed how it works with all the flaws that just seem to grow. Heck whilst typing this I get an email from police about some bail I never attended and yet again, it's the wrong person and has nothing to do with me beyond causing me more grief and stress. I don't even have a criminal record and due to do jury duty later this year, which is unlikely as being driven to wits end.
- Angostura 3y ago
  If you are going though something similar, don’t forget to let Private Eye know.
  - Zenst 3y ago
    Think I did poke them a couple of years ago, never heard back. Oh well, way more evidence now and have it somewhat in-hand. Just so slow going thru the process and even then, getting evidence together and data requests and the level of failures just compounding. As so wide and kinda sureal that it is hard to believe. Police and housing covered up and protected an abuse addict (police informer) and ignored so many safty concerns and evidence that people dead due to it and past people who tried to speak out, either dead or gaslighted. Even tried that on me and sadly for them I recorded evidence for years and now case of bring all their failures to light in the open. Let alone all the housing failures that just keep growing. Fact my gas supplier identified fault in gas safty in october that they still not fixed and my concerns that impacted not only my flat but all the other flats (it does as i checked) and entire estate as fault when built and as such making every gas and electrical safty certificate for past 25 years invalid. Seems to fall on deaf ears, even HSE (Health and Safty Executive) seem to be, well they should fix it and toothless. Yet this is just nothing and whole list of failures by them that they already under investigation. Let alone all my findings and damming evidence. The the Met Police. But hard to really deal with it due to PTSD of it all and decade of abusive neighbours who literally tried to get me killed and not only proof of that ignored but made out the other way around when it is clear as crystal with evidence submitted that is not only untrue but downright blatant lie. Police ignored that and more so, much more in past that it is a history of pure and utter failings and criminal. Glad I have video and audio recordings proving it and that includes meetings in which police and housing lie and damming as hell. Yet, you would think somebody would care, but dam as I'm not alone in these situations. But look at Post Office scandal - how many people died over that and efforts to get to light. Then the pressure to pursue the truth and effort when others died trying. It is scary how often things get covered up. There again, I used to work for the BBC and mindful how things can get swept under carpets and ignored like Jimmy.
mhh__ 3y ago
I have been reading about this in private eye for maybe a decade, nothing happens, TV show? Instant progress overnight.
- JdeBP 3y ago
  That seems to be one of the points that the BBC article is making, too. Panorama, one of the BBC's highest profile current affairs shows, points this out in 2015, and nothing happens. Post Office Ltd even pats itself on the back that nothing comes of the BBC programme. ITV dramatizes it in 2024, not even handling it as news, and it's immediately Conservative government priority.
  - dtf 3y ago
    Some bright spark at CCHQ realised it could be weaponised against both Ed Davey (Leader of the Liberal Democrats, and former Post Office minister 2010-2012) and Keir Starmer (Leader of the Labour Party, and former Director of Public Prosecutions 2008-2013).
    - JdeBP 3y ago
      Which continues the theme, really. That the British public is not motivated by a BBC Panorama documentary in 2015 or by ten years of Private Eye coverage or by 15 years of Computer World coverage, but only finally by a dramatization by ITV; says much the same as the fact that politicians believe that people will swallow the mud slinging that the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business are responsible for private prosecutions pursued by Post Office Ltd itself, not by the CPS and not by a government ministry for (by then privatized) business affairs.
  - mhh__ 3y ago
    They're probably angling to use it against Keira Starmer because he was DPP
    - mhh__ 3y ago
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thesaintlives 3y ago
No idea if the t.v. show is good but the radio 4 show most certainly is: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m000jf7j Check that out to see how the U.K. establishment works.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  The TV series is very good, but it's quite tough going in places.
edandersen 3y ago
Last I heard they were trying to rebuild Horizon on "AWS and JavaScript". I wish I was joking.
- tauchunfall 3y ago
  There is a cloud-based system which will be the successor of Horizon legacy (from 1999) and Horizon online (from around 2010). >Is Horizon still being used? >Yes. There have been several versions of Horizon since its introduction in 1999 and the current version of the system, introduced from 2017, was found in the group litigation to be robust, relative to comparable systems. But we are not complacent about that and are continuing to work, together with our postmasters, to make improvements. We will be moving away from Horizon to a new IT cloud-based system that will be more user-friendly and easier to adapt for new products and services. This is currently being developed with the involvement of our Postmasters. via: https://corporate.postoffice.co.uk/en/horizon-scandal-pages/faqs https://corporate.postoffice.co.uk/en/horizon-scandal-pages/...
  - arcza 3y ago
    This kind of comment (not your actual comment) shows the pitifully simplistic people making crucial decisions in UK public IT. On prem vs off prem has nothing to do with this yet cloud is phrased as a key tenet of improvement. I suppose give it a few years it'll be described as "LLM ready" too.
raesene9 3y ago
I was reading an interesting bit today (https://read.uolpress.co.uk/read/electronic-evidence-and-electronic-signatures/section/0f113452-78ad-4c82-b28f-08cff1877036#book-part-005 https://read.uolpress.co.uk/read/electronic-evidence-and-ele...) about the "presumption of reliability" that can occur in cases involving "mechanical instruments" which is extended to include software. I think the idea that complex systems are assumed to always be correct is... dicey at the best of times and even more so when it's critical to a criminal case.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  For some computer functions it makes sense, such as audit logs and other basic operations e.g. timestamps. For complicated accounting software, there should definitely be some kind of proof of correctness such as being self consistent and having sufficient auditing and logging systems.
  - graemep 3y ago
    It was actually intended to stop people challenging the reliability of things like speed cameras.
    - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      Yes, that's an interesting case as cameras are routinely calibrated, but the software is closed source which I think is a mistake. It should be possible to challenge whether a system is operating correctly if you have decent evidence against it e.g. GPS tracking. I do think that modern cars should be fitted with a black box device with the owner having ultimate control over access to it, so they could submit it for evidence to prevent miscarriages of justice.
      - graemep 3y ago
        I think "presumed to be operating normally for certain devices is certain oversight and testing requirements are met" is reasonable. Definitely ought to be open source. I wonder whether the black boxes insurance companies like to push would provide the evidence required?
forinti 3y ago
One has to wonder how bad the justice system has to be if a trial is unable to surface the truth in this rather trivial case. And it failed multiple times.
- fmajid 3y ago
  England's legal system is still riddled with the legacy of feudalism. The private prosecution mechanism used by the Post Office was first used in the 17th Century. Note that Scotland has its own legal system and it is generally saner. Not sure if any sub-postmasters were prosecuted in Scotland.
  - M2Ys4U 3y ago
    >Not sure if any sub-postmasters were prosecuted in Scotland. They were, though through the usual public mechanism by the Procurator Fiscal
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > Scotland has its own legal system and it is generally saner Scotland's legal system prosecuted and jailed Craig Murray. It also prosecuted Alex Salmond, who was unanimously acquitted by a jury; but Craig didn't benefit from a jury. The chief prosecutor is a member of the government, and controls police investigations. In the case of a political prosecution, I wouldn't describe the Scottish system as "saner".
    - Marazan 3y ago
      Craig Murray identified complainants who's identity had been protected by court order. What did you expect to happen?
      - denton-scratch 3y ago
        Not really; that's "jigsaw identification", i.e. identification is only possible by combining multiple reports. It was not possible to identify complainants just by reading Craig's blog. Other journalists, whose writings could be used to directly identify complainants, were not prosecuted.
HenryBemis 3y ago
..and THIS is why you need a strong, independent Internal Audit dept, with serious, educated, trained IT Auditors. News like that make me very angry. From the little I find to read, looks like it would take a 'basic' IT Auditor could in a few days figure out (and fail) basic ITGCs. And it amazes me when I hear the term "DevOps" (cringe). But hey, I get it.. we need to make money, A LOT of money, and we need to make it FAST because of reasons (competition, greed, lack of talent, timing, etc.). Who has time and money to spend on Dev/Staging/Prod? Only stupid highly regulated environments need to be stupid enough to do this.. Going back to the story, THIS happens, people go to prison, people die. I have (in my IT Audit years) discovered/uncovered SO MANY tragic things. And what scares me.. when I see YC 'offsprings' hiring and 99.9% of jobs are "stuff-building/money-making". Zero audit roles. And I am not angry because "damn - please hire me".. it's that how many of these places have an experience, IT savvy auditor? Not someone's cousin that is an accountant.. (no disrespect - it will take a CPA 10+ years to not be tricked). And with that, I leave you with a friendly note on IT Auditors find and hire one with strong IT knowledge/background. They are worth their weight in Latinum!!
- robbbbbbbbbbbb 3y ago
  To be fair, neither of the two organisations responsible for Horizon over the period in question - Fujitsu Services, formerly ICL Pathway - in any way resemble your pastiche of "YC Offspring" startups. Indeed, they were the exact opposite: huge multinationals with presumably gigantic legal, infosec and HR policy departments who could probably jump through the various compliance hurdles required by this procurement process in their sleep. By comparison the startups you're complaining about usually take years to reach sufficient maturity to take part in large public sector procurement processes like this. Clearly in this case maturity and scale were not a bulwark against incompetence, opacity and mendacity. Indeed the opposite - as I type this the Post Office's lawyers Herbert Smith Freehills are making mealy mouthed justifications for witholding reams of technical evidence from the public enquiry for months. It's disgusting, and as someone running a small business and endlessly having to justify our commitment to information security, data privacy and transparency I find the hypocrisy infuriating.
  - 3y ago
bloomingeek 3y ago
<Senior Post Office managers briefed the BBC that neither their staff nor Fujitsu - the company which built and maintained the Horizon system - could remotely access sub-postmasters' accounts, even though Post Office directors had been warned four years earlier that such remote access was possible.> Jeez, as I'm betting almost all readers of HN know, if it's connected to the internet, it's not always secure. I'd suggest this is a blatant lie, the truth of which could have easily been verified by asking their in-house tech. After being told by Fujitsu about remote access possibilities, they didn't want believe them?
- duncans 3y ago
  The system was originally connected via private ISDN lines so that wouldn’t have been a factor for the first cases.
cmsefton 3y ago
I highly recommend reading Private Eye's special report, Justice Lost In The Post https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi... [PDF] Private Eye were one of the few people reporting on this regularly. I've been reading about it in there for close on ten years, and am still astonished that it's taken this long to really hit home what happened to these individuals. Bravo to the makers of the recent show that's brought it back into the spotlight. It's truly shocking what the Post Office and Fujitsu did, and one can only hope prosecutions arise from this. For anyone working in IT, there are lessons to be learned here about what impact software can have on individuals' lives, and bravo to any whistleblower that came forward to speak out.
- heresie-dabord 3y ago
  > there are lessons to be learned here about what impact => a mgmt crowd with zero skills and integrity <= can have on individuals' lives A friendly yet rueful amendment.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  It's more shocking than that. It's just one example of a culture of corruption that pervades government and government-adjacent contracting in the UK. Fujitsu acted like thugs not just to save face, but because important shareholders would lose money if the truth came out. Also, this kind of thing: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/fujitsu-post-office-scandal-building-digital-uk/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/fujitsu-post-office-scandal... The PM's father in law is the head of Infosys. The PM's wife still has significant holdings in Infosys. Infosys and Fujitsu have a close partnership. And so on. It's corrupt from top to bottom. The UK government is effectively the marketing wing of the huge public sector corporates, who invariably seem to have senior Tories and Tory donors on their boards.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    > It's corrupt from top to bottom. I’m sure that you already know about it, but the bit that gets me is the Russian oligarchs and their money, honours, property and influence. Assignations, poisoning etc and still the situation is tolerated.
idontwantthis 3y ago
So who did alter the records? Were employees at Fujitsu stealing or just fucking around?
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  As far as I can tell, employees at Fujitsu couldn't get the money; they used the remote access feature to correct the errors that resulted from the bugs. According to the show, this was often done sloppily, so that a £3,000 discrepancy would turn into a £6,000 discrepancy, instead of being reduced to zero. These changes via remote access were not logged. There was also a point in the drama where the Fujitsu support staff talked a subpostmaster through fixing the errors herself; that is, accounts could be tampered with without using remote access. I suppose all this unaudited frigging with balances was enabled to cover up the fact that Horizon had serious bugs. What I'm waiting to find out is why the Post Office managers were so desperate to protect the reputation of Horizon, that they were willing to risk being charged with perverting the course of justice.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    > What I'm waiting to find out is why the Post Office managers were so desperate to protect the reputation of Horizon, that they were willing to risk being charged with perverting the course of justice. They received bonuses for each successful prosecution and it would be career suicide for any of them to blow the whistle.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      I get that the investigators, lawyers and lower-level managers were being encouraged with bonuses to cover-up the Horizon shortcomings, and use settlement offers to browbeat subpostmasters into exhonerating Horizon. What I haven't learned yet, is why senior management wanted so much to exhonerate Horizon, that they would hand out bonuses to investigators, and to inquiry witnesses who gave "the right" testimony. The Post Office doesn't have a lot of money; it only broke profit in about 2014. It can't be that the senior management were responsible for commissioning it, and screwed up; most of the people who did the comissioning will have retired. Similarly, the system was comissioned under a Labour government, and nobody from that era is still around. So I suspect it's the civil service, whose policies and cultures can outlive any human.
benrutter 3y ago
This whole horizon system story is fascinating for so many reasons. One thing I don't understand though is exactly what the bug was? For context, it led to (sometimes huge) discrepancies in what it thought should be in the till based on sales data from the day. I don't build systems anything like Horizon, so this is probably a massive over simplification, but surely tracking stock and cash in tills should be really simple? Does anyone know if there are public details on what exactly the technical bug was?
- andy_ppp 3y ago
  Haha, obviously you haven’t worked in any large enterprises before that aren’t software companies. Basically the business rolls dice and comes up with some random requirements and then tries to change those requirements constantly until you end up with software that looks so hideous nobody understands anything about it and all the chopping and changing leaves the code in a complete mess with lots of bugs. The problem is the people making these requests do not understand the costs, if they were building a house they wouldn’t dig up the foundations on a whim, but because software is so ephemeral it seems (to them at least) cost free.
- InsomniacL 3y ago
  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-... I have only skimmed this so far but it seems there were many bugs. Also this stood out to me. > 4. Fujitsu inserted transactions. These are injected into branch accounts by Fujitsu. They may be performed in order to ‘balance’ a discrepancy. These do NOT require acceptance by SPMs in the same manner as TCs and TAs.
  - tauchunfall 3y ago
    >Fujitsu inserted transactions They inserted transactions for corrections of discrepancies where you could not see they were authored by them; it was just assumed the postmaster did. They did not let postmasters know about this; probably an order by the post office. These corrections where incorrect, and caused discrepancies to increase; they mixed plus and minus sign quite often. They added lines of code to the system running on the counter in the local post office. They used the message store system like wild west without defining a data schema.
InsomniacL 3y ago
What shocks me the most is the amount people who pleaded guilty (who claim they are innocent) to receive a lesser sentence. I'd equate that to torture.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  Isn’t that the general issue with plea deals? Unless you are wealthy, pleading out is often the better choice.
- davedx 3y ago
  The entire US criminal justice system revolves around plea bargains
  - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    For anyone who thinks the parent is exaggerating: 97% of all convictions in the US is due to the plea bargains.
- SkyBelow 3y ago
  This is why plea deals should be considered a violation of any notion of rights to a jury trial, fair trial, or similar. It is like the right to vote, where voting for the wrong party might end up with you going to prison.
sheepscreek 3y ago
I am absolutely flabbergasted. At least for American public companies, SOX compliance requirements make it impossible for something like this to ever happen without an explicit authorization in place. The rule is simple: every destructive action (think mutable) needs to have one requester and one approver. As long as it is logged in some system, you’re golden. This is somewhat enforced through regular publicly disclosed audits. I suppose that’s what Ernst and Young did when they noted in an audit that Fujitsu has unrestricted access to modify accounts without the postmasters knowledge, and this poses risk. What strikes me as bizarre is that no regulatory body took any action on that report. Maybe the report was private, I’m not sure - I don’t know how things work in the UK. In any case, this really takes your trust away from public institutions. You’re left to wonder, if this was possible, what else might still be possible?
- mcguire 3y ago
  I've worked on HR software for a large organization in the US that relatively frequently gets sued on hiring decisions. One of the features that the customer desired was essentially an overriding, free-form, editor for the recorded information, as part of the "get all of the information for a case to be submitted to the court" bit. We didn't do it, because the entire development team thought it was ridiculous, and the person requesting it retired before issue boiled over.
miohtama 3y ago
Here is the Wikipedia page on the topic. The issues started already in 90s and dragged without a proper fix, people committing suicides as the result https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#:~:text=The%20report%20described%20the%20Horizon,and%20old%20and%20unreliable%20hardware https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#....
mgkimsal 3y ago
Watched the Mr Bates 4 part series, and a few things didn't make much sense to me. The balancing. Perhaps because more was cash, but I would have expected some logging to have shown "at 4pm, the account had cash on hand of X pounds. at 4:08pm, the account had 2300 pounds less". Would that not have been useful? But watching (yes, it was a dramatization, but it didn't seem like much), it seems like PO did not want to admit any fault, ever, at all, and just kept sticking to that far beyond the time when they could have just cut their loss, held up their hands, and said "hey - problem identified, we'll fix it". If I sold 5000 pounds of stuff, and should have received 5000 pounds, and... I have 5000 pounds on hand, but the computer says I have a shortfall 1000 pounds... how is that defensible? Where did the money 'go'? If I had 4000 pounds on hand, but the computer then said I should have 6000, and I'm short 2000 pounds... why wasn't that discpreancy noted? Also.. what was the motivation behind all the changes? The whistleblower seemed to indicate this was remote people at horizon "fixing" things by hand. Were these all just 'accidents' no one owned up to? The drama seemed to indicate there was some intentional retaliation against some people, but it couldn't have been intentional in all cases. But also... it doesn't sound like anyone at Horizon stole that money, they were just changing figures in a system.
- Marazan 3y ago
  One of the bugs in the system was that one of the data entry screens which postmasters recorded their takings would routinely freeze. If you hit "Return" again whilst the screen was frozen it would silently submit the figures again. So if you had £4000 of takings and submitted, got the frozen screen bug and hit return again then the Post Office thought you had £8000 of takings. These were _incredibly obvious_ duplicate entry errors when the Post Office investigated but they blindly took the system as perfect and automatically assumed criminality on the part of the postmaster. NOTHING about this makes any sense if you assume people on the Post Office/Fujitsu side were acting in good faith.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    > These were _incredibly obvious_ duplicate entry errors when the Post Office investigated but they blindly took the system as perfect and automatically assumed criminality on the part of the postmaster They did not blindly take the system as perfect, but instead they were well aware of the errors and instead decided to bully the sub postmasters and gain bonuses for successful prosecution. They knew exactly what they were doing and took pains to hide any evidence of the shortcomings of Horizon.
dccoolgai 3y ago
I was wondering when this was going to breach the Zeitgeist. I've been reading about it for a while now. I'd really love to watch the recent show about it (that apparently triggered the awareness of it in the U.K.) but I can't find a way to watch it on any of my streaming services in the U.S. Does anyone know how to see it in the States?
- dazc 3y ago
  It was an ITV series which isn't a streaming service, as such. You may be able to access the Radio series though which is well worth a listen. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j
  - JdeBP 3y ago
    ITVX is, purportedly, though. I have some relatives who tried out ITVX for the first time especially to watch the drama, which they didn't catch as it was broadcast. They reported that ITVX was almost unusable, and also that the app crashed their telly and caused it to lose the ability to output sound until they rebooted the telly and let it go through an update cycle. "BBC iPlayer is much better." came the grumble down the telephone. (-: I told them that it was ITV, which has 4 channels and is almost bound to repeat it.
    - JdeBP 3y ago
      Addendum: ITV duly repeated it, as predicted, 3 days after I wrote that; and the relatives tell me that they happily watched it on broadcast.
    - dazc 3y ago
      True, ITVX or whatever it was called before actually worked OK but then they updated it and made it quite terrible.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  I'd recommend pirating it and it's easy enough to find through the usual trackers.
yard2010 3y ago
After the latest bullshit from the BBC I can't trust anything they say, I need to check their sources on everything and honestly it's so tiring I just ignore their stuff. There are better sources for news. Like, credible sources
- erinaceousjones 3y ago
  This is an article that heavily mentions the BBC, the broadcaster of Panorama, being threatened by the Post Office. Other than the Panorama production company, whom chose to be interviewed by the BBC, in this instance where else would you go for a direct source? If I were to hazard a guess, you haven't chosen to read the article, and have no motivation to actually substantiate your distrust for them past a vague "it's bullshit".
cube00 3y ago
Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry Livestream https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947 https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947 Inquiry website https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk
capr 3y ago
but has any of this made any of you intelligent middle class people with best access to self-education ever doubt our social organization based on a monopoly on the use of violence in a geographical area?
krisoft 3y ago
I have a tangential question to this whole debacle: I'm a developer who worked on a lot of safety critical stuff. I think I know a lot about that. But never worked with "money stuff". What are the best practices in this regard? I understand this whole thing is not just a software development failure. But it also feels as if the Fujitsu developers had done a better job we wouldn't be having the whole debacle. So what are the best practices with a system like this? Are there good and practical books for example on the topic?
- pjc50 3y ago
  A good start might be the French "NF525" law, which lays down legal standards for how cash registers should work. https://www2.ikosoft.com/en-gb/all-knowledge-about-the-nf525-standard-for-cash-register-software/ https://www2.ikosoft.com/en-gb/all-knowledge-about-the-nf525... / https://www2.ikosoft.com/en-gb/cash-security-software-how-to-comply-with-standards-nf525/ https://www2.ikosoft.com/en-gb/cash-security-software-how-to... "Any software with nf certification must not allow any concealment of data essential for VAT assessment. It must be equipped with a system for identification and tracing of all processes and information relating to collections. Concerning the registration, the security is done by electronic signature. All information recorded in the cash register system cannot be modified or deleted. Errors and returns are automatically considered as new transactions. As regards the retention of data, the minimum period imposed by the standard is six years. Furthermore, during a tax audit, an archiving system must facilitate the interventions of the tax authorities, by quickly restoring the data necessary for the calculation of VAT. Note that archiving is systematic before any purging procedure. This rule ensures that the data is available at each intervention of the administration’s agents." It's perhaps a bit more like signed git commits than blockchain; the requirement is that every transaction be signed and immutable. If "corrections" are required, the correction has to be appended to the log leaving the original in place. I believe there's also a requirement to feed all this receipt data to the tax authorities.
codeulike 3y ago
Here's a system audit manual from Jan 2000, part of the inquiry evidence. Lets figure out how this thing worked. https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/pol00029165-icl-pathway-horizon-system-audit-manual-csr-v13 https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/pol0002...
- duncans 3y ago
  See also the Fujitsu whistleblower, Richard Rolls’ witness statement https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/witn00780100-richard-roll-witness-statement https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/witn007...
- tauchunfall 3y ago
  There is also a detailed description of the system in [1]. An interesting incidence/problem report is in [2] at 1h:03m:00s, where an replication error in their Riposte message store system is described. After a defect counter hardware was replaced, it will fill its empty store with messages from other counters. [1] "Technical Appendix to Judgment (No.6) “Horizon Issues”", https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/bates-v-post-office-appendix-1-1.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/bates-v-... [2] "Alvin Finch - Richard Coleman - Day 54 AM (17 May 2023) - Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0_-ebCVU5k&t=3780 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0_-ebCVU5k&t=3780 [3] Steven Murdoch: "What went wrong with Horizon: learning from the Post Office Trial", https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2021/07/15/what-went-wrong-with-horizon-learning-from-the-post-office-trial/ https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2021/07/15/what-went-wrong-with...
arkh 3y ago
The thing is: the higher ups thinking that postmasters where routinely stealing and the fact Fujitsu altering records without logging was standard shows a culture where you can bet those higher ups are used to steal and think everyone does it.
menzoic 3y ago
This couldn't happen if the transactions were on a blockchain
- greggsy 3y ago
  Or better accounting, testing, logging and administration standards, which would be necessary with or without blockchain.
lagerlagerlager 3y ago
ICL originally had contract AFAIK. It seems to me that the disappeared funds could have gone to people with access to the system and not just a result of accidental coding. International Computers Limited existed as a commercial entity and brand from 1968 to 2002, it was finally and completely absorbed into Fujitsu.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  > It seems to me that the disappeared funds could have gone to people with access to the system How could that happen outside of the Post Office? ICL/Fujitsu had remote access to all the remote boxes and could add/amend records without any audit trail and without knowledge of the sub postmasters, but I can't see how they could get money to go into their own pockets unless they entered into a deal with the sub postmaster operating the branch. Hypothetically, they could delete some transactions and then the sub postmaster would have more money in their till than accounted for and could split the proceeds. (I don't think this ever happened).
- joe463369 3y ago
  The disappeared funds were briefly covered in the programme. Standard accountancy practice when you've got mystery funds is to record them in a 'suspense account' and if it comes to light where the dough came from, you update your records. If no one comes forward after x years you just have to treat it as free money from who-knows-where.
iandanforth 3y ago
Is the Post Office a private company? Why are they using phrases like 'protect our brand?'
- JdeBP 3y ago
  Yes, Post Office Ltd is a private company. It was privatized at the turn of the 21st century, and there are odd holdovers from the four centuries of it being a royal monopoly with sweeping powers, more on which at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076.
zh3 3y ago
What is clear about this is that the system couldn't even balance the books (which has been obvious for years, to anyone in the UK following the story). If the computer says "You took £x thousand and only banked £Y thousand", the first thing to do is audit the receipts and (unless there were fraudulent entries being made, while noting this was allegedly not possible) as the first rule of forensic accounting is 'follow the money'. What's so bad here is that the executives of a well respected UK institution acted purely from a profit/reputational motive, and dug themselves deeper and deeper into the hole as a result. More scarey part of this is that it's Minority Report - "Computer says you're guilty, end of story". Positive take would be the courts are less likely to believe the 'computers are infallible' line in the future.
spondyl 3y ago
Some important context that might be useful for fellow confused readers: A new four-part dramatisation about the Horizon scandal aired from January 1st - 4th in the UK. As a result, the scandal became a popular topic for discussion publically and in the media, as well as introducing the issue to a whole bunch of people who were unaware I was a bit confused myself as to why this was getting coverage out of the blue until I learned about the ITV series yesterday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office
chris_wot 3y ago
Why would anyone allow Fujitsu to gain new contracts?

525 points by johndunne 3y ago

This Post Office scandal is currently ongoing in the UK. The Fujitsu developer in question confirmed what the Post Office was denying, that the Horizon software at the center of the scandal, had implemented methods for secretly editing accounts. Approx 700 postmasters (self-employed managers of Post Office branches) were held responsible when large amounts of cash appeared to have vanished from tills, resulting in prosecutions for fraud and theft. I know someone who was affected by this, who managed a now-closed Post Office branch here in Wakefield, UK and it was a life ruining ordeal for her. She was accused of stealing £1,000's in cash. I'm not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records for her branch, but the campaign the Post Office ran to smear any accusations of wrongfulness on the part of the Horizon software is shocking.

ExoticPearTree 3y ago
I loosely followed the discussion here on HN, but I don't see any mention of anyone from the Post Office being arrested/prosecuted/sentenced for this. It seems that some people there abused their power and need to cool down behind bars.
- petesergeant 3y ago
  In fact, they had recently shortlisted the lady in charge of the PO at the time to be the Bishop of London, because of course they had.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    That's Paula Vennells and she was awarded a CBE for her role in running the Post Office. However, there's just been a petition that garnered over 1.2 million signatures for her to be stripped of her CBE and in response, she has "promised" to return it. I, for one, don't believe her.
    - nebulous1 3y ago
      Apparently she can't "return" it, it has to be annulled by the British monarch.
      - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
        I hope Charlie does that then, but it depends on whether he cares enough about it. I think it would be fitting if a significant percentage of other people with CBEs started to return them with public statements about them not wanting to be associated with the likes of Paula Vennells.
        tialaramex 3y ago
        It's not really on Charlie, any more than he's the one making the lists. His mother wasn't like "OH, we should honor that Post Office lady, I like receiving letters and I bet she's somehow responsible for that". She just got a list with Paula's name on it, along with various crooks, financiers, consultants, political hacks and maybe the odd charity worker. Issuing Honours is something a Monarch does, but like declaring War or deciding what Laws should govern the country, they don't actually make decisions, that's a government problem. So long as the general public were barely aware of a problem, this could skate along as not important for years, but now lots of people are angry because they saw a TV show and for once when they said "Hey this is terrible!" instead of "It's just a TV show it's not real you idiots" those of us who were paying attention are like "Yes, so what are you going to do about it?" which as we've seen puts pressure on government to actually do something.
- Tyrek 3y ago
  It's insane to me that most of the heat is being directed at Fujitsu. Sure, there's definitely some culpability there, but the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility. There's a lot weighing in on the multi-year investigation that (has been) ongoing, but I can't help but feel like they're waiting for the public furor to cool down before releasing anything.
  - toyg 3y ago
    > the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility. It really depends on what Fujitsu told which PO manager.
    - tialaramex 3y ago
      The Post Office also paid independent people to figure out where the problem is, and the answer was "Horizon is garbage, you can't rely on it". So, they fired those people. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974 This a pattern we've seen before 1. "We aren't wrong, you are too involved to make an impartial decision. We need somebody independent to investigate" 2. "The independent investigation has finished, but we need to properly digest their report, so we can't tell you what they said yet" 3. "We've now realised the independent investigation was inadequate, everybody who worked on it was incompetent and its findings are useless so we've destroyed the report. We declare ourselves exonerated, we were right all along". People tend to have this mistaken understanding of morality which assumes they're a good person and so therefore obviously what they did must be good (since they're a good person) and so they might need to uh, fix differences between the world as they've imagined it and the slightly less rosy reality. For example sure, you know that stabbing Sarah in the throat resulted in Sarah becoming dead, but you had to do that, because you're a good person and Sarah was going to tell the Police that you'd stolen $18.5M from the business. You didn't steal that money! Sure, yes, you took the money and maybe you technically shouldn't have done that, but you had a 100% sure strategy for playing Blackjack and recovering the $800 000 you lost last month, except that you got a bit confused and lost all of the $18.5M, but that's not theft, that's just a minor mistake you will be able to soon fix, if only Sarah doesn't tell these lies about stealing and get you arrested. So you had to, it wasn't murder, it was really self defence. You're a Good Person!
- ExoticPearTree 3y ago
  To sort of answer my own question: - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/13/business/uk-post-office-fujitsu-horizon-scandal/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/13/business/uk-post-office-f... - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-quash-wrongful-post-office-convictions https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-quash-wrong... From the CNN article it seems like the police is going to get involved in this, so at least some good news for the people wrongfully prosecuted by the people charge of the Post Office.
prof-dr-ir 3y ago
> currently ongoing in the UK To be precise it is finally getting some of the attention it deserves, both from the public and from the government. The miscarriages of justice date from 1999 until 2015, and the high court ruling (about the software being faulty) that finally stopped the flow of convictions dates from 2019, almost five years ago. Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable. If that delay sounds absolutely bonkers to you then yes, that is what everyone else thinks as well.
- krisoft 3y ago
  > Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable. Even crazier. The Post Office just recently lowered(!) the amount of money they allocated for compensations: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67784706 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67784706 They basically allocated a pot of money to pay the people they have harmed off. But these people had to actively go out and request their conviction to be overturned. Which of course many people were reluctant to do, since it means they would be upturning their life again, and going to court and finding lawyers and etc. They understandably have very little trust in the system. So Post Office just shrugged and decided they don't need to keep that much money around.
  - scott_w 3y ago
    > Even crazier. The Post Office just recently lowered(!) the amount of money It's even worse: they're still fighting hard against the appeals, heaping more misery on the people trying to turn their lives around!
    - miohtama 3y ago
      Sounds like lawyers are at the driving seat
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - 3y ago
dmix 3y ago
Was it the post office itself that was dealing out charges? Like a post office inspector or whatever it's called? Or was it a normal police referral type thing?
- benrutter 3y ago
  So apparently in UK law, the post office carry out their own investigations before taking charges to court (effectively replacing the police for internal post office charges) which sounds mental to me.
  - scott_w 3y ago
    David Davis mentioned this on News Agents. It seems like a holdover from when it was simply an arm of the state, where it made sense that it could just handle its own enforcement (since it carried the power of the Crown). It's absolutely something that needs to be stripped away in the modern day.
    - RuggedPineapple 3y ago
      It's not really a holdover because the UK allows ANYONE to bring a private prosecution. They just have the resources to do it at scale.
      - JdeBP 3y ago
        There are legal arguments recounted in modern law textbooks that the whole idea of private prosecutions in England and Wales is a hold-over nowadays. The argument goes that since CPS decisions are subject to judicial review, the raison d'être for private prosecutions, that they allow for bad exercise of public prosecutorial discretion to be corrected by private persons, no longer exists, since the bad exercise of discretion now has another remedy. There is a fair groundswell of opinion, already driven by the bad reputation that the RSPCA, another prolific private prosecutor, has garnered, against private prosecutions. The Horizon thing only serves to fuel this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were not soon a proposal to do away with all private prosecutions on the back of these, despite the fact that Post Office Ltd and the RSPCA are institutional private prosecutors, and there's nowhere near as strong a case that personal private prosecutors are a problem.
e40 3y ago
Is there a podcast that talks about this?
- mrw34 3y ago
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j/episodes/downloads https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j/episodes/downloads
- supertron 3y ago
  I recommend The Guardian's podcast episodes covering this: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited-the-post-office-scandal-part-1-podcast https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited-the-post-office-scandal-part-2-podcast https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisi... Also some Private Eye podcast episodes: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/95 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/95
sonicanatidae 3y ago
Welp, it'll be a fine, paid with other people's money and that's about it. Jail. The people who knowingly lied and sent people to prison need to be jailed. Not fined, not given a handie, not allowed to simply retire. J.A.I.L. They callously wrecked people's lives, including some that committed suicide.
- maeil 3y ago
  Jail is not enough of a deterrent for the kind of enormous damage some of the involved have caused to society. For such large-scale, fully intentional, proven harm to society out of nothing but self-interest over a long period of time, stronger penalties than jail must be applied.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Such as? (Bearing in mind the ECHR)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - sonicanatidae 3y ago
      Beating them with pool cues about the head and shoulders until their retinas detach would be a great consequence.
      - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
        Would you sign up as an executor? Or would you rather have some other sadist to do it?
        sonicanatidae 3y ago
        You have no idea how fast I would jump to be the one with the pool cue. They would have to reconsider light being the fastest thing in the universe. It's not about sadism. It's about people getting deserved consequences for actions that greatly harmed a large number of people. Me? I'm just tired of watching it all. Treat people reasonably, and not be a Snidely Whiplash level of asshat or you get the pool cue.
rlpb 3y ago
> I'm not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records for her branch... From https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post-offices-horizon-system-failed-a-technical-breakdown https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post...: > One [bug]...would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for. The fact that this is even possible, apart from the sheer incompetency of a software design that permits it, means that no person can reasonably be accused of stealing cash if that accusation is based on records from this system.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  > would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record Consider the shittiest homegrown shopping portal probably doesn't do that and any commercial point of sale system absolutely won't do that either. The system has to be such a POS internally that no other vendor will take the liability for it. Reminds me of the Therac-25 that killed people. This thing probably killed more people than that.
  - notso411 3y ago
    This was custom software on custom hardware. Bit different from some web app with built in debounce.
    - rcxdude 3y ago
      So is basically any point of sale system. Realllllly not an excuse.
    - bloqs 3y ago
      The underlying paradigms are the same and it is inexcusable
- 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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EdwardDiego 3y ago
My wife and I watched Mr Bates vs the Post Office, recently, it was one of those watches where you spend a lot of time yelling "How the fuck?! What the fuck?!" at the screen because the malice and dishonesty was so deliberate, so persistently maintained, lest the "brand" be sullied. I've been following this story for years, I know BBC's Panorama covered it in 2015, and was really surprised there wasn't more of an outcry in the UK about such blatant unfairness, guess technical cases like this are really helped by a TV drama with quality actors making it easily accessible to the general population, as soon as ITV aired the miniseries, the petition to have Vennall's CBE stripped jumped from 7K signatures to 700K+, and she said she would return it. (not the golden handshakes and "performance" bonuses though lol) I just can't believe that no-one has been held criminally accountable (yet) for the sheer (to quote the judges in the civil case) affront to justice that this represented - whether it was Post Office Limited (POL) misleading (well, lying to) the courts, or Fujitsu employees lying in prosecutions, or POL deliberately withholding evidence in their role as a prosecutor (wild that this power to prosecute as transferred from Royal Mail to the spun off entity), and some of the cynically legalistic games they played (like asking the judge to recuse himself for being biased against them, to further delay the outcome of the civil suit). And the crap they pulled with the Second Sight independent analysis that they commissioned themselves... I was just reading the Clarke Advice(s), and god-damn, I can't see how any former POL executives can claim "we honestly believed all that stuff we said in court, honest", after their own goddamn independent legal advice told them "stop these prosecutions, like now, your expert witness is full of shit" The 2nd Clarke Advice is a great read too, basically "STOP TRYING TO HIDE EVIDENCE, JESUS CHRIST". Oh, and some of the code that turned up from Horizon in an internal Fujitsus report is egregiously bad (how do I turn x into -x or -x into x? What's -(-x)? nevermind, I got this), from what I've read, the team that wrote Fujitsus was considered low skilled and mocked by other groups within Fujitsu as basically a group of clowns merely lacking a circus. Clarke Advice 1: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Clarke-advice-re-Jenkins.pdf https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/... Clarke Advice 2: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/20130802-Clarke-advice-re-shredding-1.pdf https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/... Fujitsu report: 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... Discussion of recusal application by Court of Appeal: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/assets/recusal_judgment.pdf https://taxpolicy.org.uk/assets/recusal_judgment.pdf
DebtDeflation 3y ago
>implemented methods for secretly editing accounts. >not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records It seems to me that determining whether this was a bug or a deliberate backdoor that allowed someone connected to Fujitsu to change account values should have been one of the first priorities of the investigation. The CNN article I read before the BBC article didn't even mention this, it seemed to just imply that this was all a mistake or at worst the government/Fujitsu trying to coverup the fact that the software was shoddy.
hmottestad 3y ago
I wonder if anyone thought that it seemed a bit far fetched for 100 postmasters to all steal money. Then when it was 200, it must seem doubly far fetched. Once 500 postmasters were caught "stealing" money, wouldn't someone wonder how they managed to hire 500 dishonest people. Typically when you catch one person you always wonder how many got away with it, so they catch 500 then there must be 5000 or 50 000 postmasters that were stealing without getting caught. How many post offices are there really in the UK?
ddmf 3y ago
It's absolutely disgusting, and it may also allow a murder to go free (or someone incorrectly jailed for murder if you believe them). Also, strange seeing my hometown mentioned on here!

rich_sasha 3y ago

If this scandal was about incompetence only, it would be outrageous. But this was at least a deliberate, criminal cover up at the expense of hundreds of innocent people, maybe worse, implemented with tools intended for fighting serious crime. It seems unbelievable that this could happen in a civilized country.

HPsquared 3y ago
It does shatter the illusion somewhat.
127361 3y ago
They had Operation Ore in the early 2000s, thousands of innocent people were arrested and it resulted in 44 suicides. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/apr/26/comment.society https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/apr/26/comment.s... https://insidetime.org/newsround/massive-miscarriage-of-justice/ https://insidetime.org/newsround/massive-miscarriage-of-just...
- gadders 3y ago
  And the Tom Watson delusion: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-64057457 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-640...
- karlzt 3y ago
  That article says 39 suicides and wikipedia says 33.
grumpyprole 3y ago
It also remains to be seen whether there will ever be any accountability. So far there has only been the promise to hand back a CBE.
- alexriddle 3y ago
  Which isn't even legally permissible, there is no way to 'give it back' (although you could stop using the title) - it can only be taken from you, which has to be done by the king on recommendation of the prime minister.

Zenst 3y ago

I can believe this as going thru something along the same lines with my housing association and met police, and it is shocking how many people who focus upon being seen to do a job and lie to cover up their mistakes have grown over the past few decades in the UK. I shudder at how many scandals never come to light as the process to clear things up and get the truth out is an uphill battle. Oh and my local MP is Ed Davey, who is deeply linked to this PO scandal, though in fairness, he does seem to be singled out over all the others who did less on their watch. I somehow wonder if society is on a path of race to the bottom at times and amazed how it works with all the flaws that just seem to grow. Heck whilst typing this I get an email from police about some bail I never attended and yet again, it's the wrong person and has nothing to do with me beyond causing me more grief and stress. I don't even have a criminal record and due to do jury duty later this year, which is unlikely as being driven to wits end.

Angostura 3y ago
If you are going though something similar, don’t forget to let Private Eye know.
- Zenst 3y ago
  Think I did poke them a couple of years ago, never heard back. Oh well, way more evidence now and have it somewhat in-hand. Just so slow going thru the process and even then, getting evidence together and data requests and the level of failures just compounding. As so wide and kinda sureal that it is hard to believe. Police and housing covered up and protected an abuse addict (police informer) and ignored so many safty concerns and evidence that people dead due to it and past people who tried to speak out, either dead or gaslighted. Even tried that on me and sadly for them I recorded evidence for years and now case of bring all their failures to light in the open. Let alone all the housing failures that just keep growing. Fact my gas supplier identified fault in gas safty in october that they still not fixed and my concerns that impacted not only my flat but all the other flats (it does as i checked) and entire estate as fault when built and as such making every gas and electrical safty certificate for past 25 years invalid. Seems to fall on deaf ears, even HSE (Health and Safty Executive) seem to be, well they should fix it and toothless. Yet this is just nothing and whole list of failures by them that they already under investigation. Let alone all my findings and damming evidence. The the Met Police. But hard to really deal with it due to PTSD of it all and decade of abusive neighbours who literally tried to get me killed and not only proof of that ignored but made out the other way around when it is clear as crystal with evidence submitted that is not only untrue but downright blatant lie. Police ignored that and more so, much more in past that it is a history of pure and utter failings and criminal. Glad I have video and audio recordings proving it and that includes meetings in which police and housing lie and damming as hell. Yet, you would think somebody would care, but dam as I'm not alone in these situations. But look at Post Office scandal - how many people died over that and efforts to get to light. Then the pressure to pursue the truth and effort when others died trying. It is scary how often things get covered up. There again, I used to work for the BBC and mindful how things can get swept under carpets and ignored like Jimmy.

mhh__ 3y ago

I have been reading about this in private eye for maybe a decade, nothing happens, TV show? Instant progress overnight.

JdeBP 3y ago
That seems to be one of the points that the BBC article is making, too. Panorama, one of the BBC's highest profile current affairs shows, points this out in 2015, and nothing happens. Post Office Ltd even pats itself on the back that nothing comes of the BBC programme. ITV dramatizes it in 2024, not even handling it as news, and it's immediately Conservative government priority.
- dtf 3y ago
  Some bright spark at CCHQ realised it could be weaponised against both Ed Davey (Leader of the Liberal Democrats, and former Post Office minister 2010-2012) and Keir Starmer (Leader of the Labour Party, and former Director of Public Prosecutions 2008-2013).
  - JdeBP 3y ago
    Which continues the theme, really. That the British public is not motivated by a BBC Panorama documentary in 2015 or by ten years of Private Eye coverage or by 15 years of Computer World coverage, but only finally by a dramatization by ITV; says much the same as the fact that politicians believe that people will swallow the mud slinging that the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business are responsible for private prosecutions pursued by Post Office Ltd itself, not by the CPS and not by a government ministry for (by then privatized) business affairs.
- mhh__ 3y ago
  They're probably angling to use it against Keira Starmer because he was DPP
  - mhh__ 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thesaintlives 3y ago

No idea if the t.v. show is good but the radio 4 show most certainly is: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m000jf7j Check that out to see how the U.K. establishment works.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
The TV series is very good, but it's quite tough going in places.

edandersen 3y ago

Last I heard they were trying to rebuild Horizon on "AWS and JavaScript". I wish I was joking.

tauchunfall 3y ago
There is a cloud-based system which will be the successor of Horizon legacy (from 1999) and Horizon online (from around 2010). >Is Horizon still being used? >Yes. There have been several versions of Horizon since its introduction in 1999 and the current version of the system, introduced from 2017, was found in the group litigation to be robust, relative to comparable systems. But we are not complacent about that and are continuing to work, together with our postmasters, to make improvements. We will be moving away from Horizon to a new IT cloud-based system that will be more user-friendly and easier to adapt for new products and services. This is currently being developed with the involvement of our Postmasters. via: https://corporate.postoffice.co.uk/en/horizon-scandal-pages/faqs https://corporate.postoffice.co.uk/en/horizon-scandal-pages/...
- arcza 3y ago
  This kind of comment (not your actual comment) shows the pitifully simplistic people making crucial decisions in UK public IT. On prem vs off prem has nothing to do with this yet cloud is phrased as a key tenet of improvement. I suppose give it a few years it'll be described as "LLM ready" too.

raesene9 3y ago

I was reading an interesting bit today (https://read.uolpress.co.uk/read/electronic-evidence-and-electronic-signatures/section/0f113452-78ad-4c82-b28f-08cff1877036#book-part-005 https://read.uolpress.co.uk/read/electronic-evidence-and-ele...) about the "presumption of reliability" that can occur in cases involving "mechanical instruments" which is extended to include software. I think the idea that complex systems are assumed to always be correct is... dicey at the best of times and even more so when it's critical to a criminal case.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
For some computer functions it makes sense, such as audit logs and other basic operations e.g. timestamps. For complicated accounting software, there should definitely be some kind of proof of correctness such as being self consistent and having sufficient auditing and logging systems.
- graemep 3y ago
  It was actually intended to stop people challenging the reliability of things like speed cameras.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    Yes, that's an interesting case as cameras are routinely calibrated, but the software is closed source which I think is a mistake. It should be possible to challenge whether a system is operating correctly if you have decent evidence against it e.g. GPS tracking. I do think that modern cars should be fitted with a black box device with the owner having ultimate control over access to it, so they could submit it for evidence to prevent miscarriages of justice.
    - graemep 3y ago
      I think "presumed to be operating normally for certain devices is certain oversight and testing requirements are met" is reasonable. Definitely ought to be open source. I wonder whether the black boxes insurance companies like to push would provide the evidence required?

forinti 3y ago

One has to wonder how bad the justice system has to be if a trial is unable to surface the truth in this rather trivial case. And it failed multiple times.

fmajid 3y ago
England's legal system is still riddled with the legacy of feudalism. The private prosecution mechanism used by the Post Office was first used in the 17th Century. Note that Scotland has its own legal system and it is generally saner. Not sure if any sub-postmasters were prosecuted in Scotland.
- M2Ys4U 3y ago
  >Not sure if any sub-postmasters were prosecuted in Scotland. They were, though through the usual public mechanism by the Procurator Fiscal
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > Scotland has its own legal system and it is generally saner Scotland's legal system prosecuted and jailed Craig Murray. It also prosecuted Alex Salmond, who was unanimously acquitted by a jury; but Craig didn't benefit from a jury. The chief prosecutor is a member of the government, and controls police investigations. In the case of a political prosecution, I wouldn't describe the Scottish system as "saner".
  - Marazan 3y ago
    Craig Murray identified complainants who's identity had been protected by court order. What did you expect to happen?
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      Not really; that's "jigsaw identification", i.e. identification is only possible by combining multiple reports. It was not possible to identify complainants just by reading Craig's blog. Other journalists, whose writings could be used to directly identify complainants, were not prosecuted.

HenryBemis 3y ago

..and THIS is why you need a strong, independent Internal Audit dept, with serious, educated, trained IT Auditors. News like that make me very angry. From the little I find to read, looks like it would take a 'basic' IT Auditor could in a few days figure out (and fail) basic ITGCs. And it amazes me when I hear the term "DevOps" (cringe). But hey, I get it.. we need to make money, A LOT of money, and we need to make it FAST because of reasons (competition, greed, lack of talent, timing, etc.). Who has time and money to spend on Dev/Staging/Prod? Only stupid highly regulated environments need to be stupid enough to do this.. Going back to the story, THIS happens, people go to prison, people die. I have (in my IT Audit years) discovered/uncovered SO MANY tragic things. And what scares me.. when I see YC 'offsprings' hiring and 99.9% of jobs are "stuff-building/money-making". Zero audit roles. And I am not angry because "damn - please hire me".. it's that how many of these places have an experience, IT savvy auditor? Not someone's cousin that is an accountant.. (no disrespect - it will take a CPA 10+ years to not be tricked). And with that, I leave you with a friendly note on IT Auditors find and hire one with strong IT knowledge/background. They are worth their weight in Latinum!!

robbbbbbbbbbbb 3y ago
To be fair, neither of the two organisations responsible for Horizon over the period in question - Fujitsu Services, formerly ICL Pathway - in any way resemble your pastiche of "YC Offspring" startups. Indeed, they were the exact opposite: huge multinationals with presumably gigantic legal, infosec and HR policy departments who could probably jump through the various compliance hurdles required by this procurement process in their sleep. By comparison the startups you're complaining about usually take years to reach sufficient maturity to take part in large public sector procurement processes like this. Clearly in this case maturity and scale were not a bulwark against incompetence, opacity and mendacity. Indeed the opposite - as I type this the Post Office's lawyers Herbert Smith Freehills are making mealy mouthed justifications for witholding reams of technical evidence from the public enquiry for months. It's disgusting, and as someone running a small business and endlessly having to justify our commitment to information security, data privacy and transparency I find the hypocrisy infuriating.
- 3y ago

bloomingeek 3y ago

<Senior Post Office managers briefed the BBC that neither their staff nor Fujitsu - the company which built and maintained the Horizon system - could remotely access sub-postmasters' accounts, even though Post Office directors had been warned four years earlier that such remote access was possible.> Jeez, as I'm betting almost all readers of HN know, if it's connected to the internet, it's not always secure. I'd suggest this is a blatant lie, the truth of which could have easily been verified by asking their in-house tech. After being told by Fujitsu about remote access possibilities, they didn't want believe them?

duncans 3y ago
The system was originally connected via private ISDN lines so that wouldn’t have been a factor for the first cases.

cmsefton 3y ago

I highly recommend reading Private Eye's special report, Justice Lost In The Post https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi... [PDF] Private Eye were one of the few people reporting on this regularly. I've been reading about it in there for close on ten years, and am still astonished that it's taken this long to really hit home what happened to these individuals. Bravo to the makers of the recent show that's brought it back into the spotlight. It's truly shocking what the Post Office and Fujitsu did, and one can only hope prosecutions arise from this. For anyone working in IT, there are lessons to be learned here about what impact software can have on individuals' lives, and bravo to any whistleblower that came forward to speak out.

heresie-dabord 3y ago
> there are lessons to be learned here about what impact => a mgmt crowd with zero skills and integrity <= can have on individuals' lives A friendly yet rueful amendment.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
It's more shocking than that. It's just one example of a culture of corruption that pervades government and government-adjacent contracting in the UK. Fujitsu acted like thugs not just to save face, but because important shareholders would lose money if the truth came out. Also, this kind of thing: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/fujitsu-post-office-scandal-building-digital-uk/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/fujitsu-post-office-scandal... The PM's father in law is the head of Infosys. The PM's wife still has significant holdings in Infosys. Infosys and Fujitsu have a close partnership. And so on. It's corrupt from top to bottom. The UK government is effectively the marketing wing of the huge public sector corporates, who invariably seem to have senior Tories and Tory donors on their boards.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > It's corrupt from top to bottom. I’m sure that you already know about it, but the bit that gets me is the Russian oligarchs and their money, honours, property and influence. Assignations, poisoning etc and still the situation is tolerated.

idontwantthis 3y ago

So who did alter the records? Were employees at Fujitsu stealing or just fucking around?

denton-scratch 3y ago
As far as I can tell, employees at Fujitsu couldn't get the money; they used the remote access feature to correct the errors that resulted from the bugs. According to the show, this was often done sloppily, so that a £3,000 discrepancy would turn into a £6,000 discrepancy, instead of being reduced to zero. These changes via remote access were not logged. There was also a point in the drama where the Fujitsu support staff talked a subpostmaster through fixing the errors herself; that is, accounts could be tampered with without using remote access. I suppose all this unaudited frigging with balances was enabled to cover up the fact that Horizon had serious bugs. What I'm waiting to find out is why the Post Office managers were so desperate to protect the reputation of Horizon, that they were willing to risk being charged with perverting the course of justice.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  > What I'm waiting to find out is why the Post Office managers were so desperate to protect the reputation of Horizon, that they were willing to risk being charged with perverting the course of justice. They received bonuses for each successful prosecution and it would be career suicide for any of them to blow the whistle.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    I get that the investigators, lawyers and lower-level managers were being encouraged with bonuses to cover-up the Horizon shortcomings, and use settlement offers to browbeat subpostmasters into exhonerating Horizon. What I haven't learned yet, is why senior management wanted so much to exhonerate Horizon, that they would hand out bonuses to investigators, and to inquiry witnesses who gave "the right" testimony. The Post Office doesn't have a lot of money; it only broke profit in about 2014. It can't be that the senior management were responsible for commissioning it, and screwed up; most of the people who did the comissioning will have retired. Similarly, the system was comissioned under a Labour government, and nobody from that era is still around. So I suspect it's the civil service, whose policies and cultures can outlive any human.

benrutter 3y ago

This whole horizon system story is fascinating for so many reasons. One thing I don't understand though is exactly what the bug was? For context, it led to (sometimes huge) discrepancies in what it thought should be in the till based on sales data from the day. I don't build systems anything like Horizon, so this is probably a massive over simplification, but surely tracking stock and cash in tills should be really simple? Does anyone know if there are public details on what exactly the technical bug was?

andy_ppp 3y ago
Haha, obviously you haven’t worked in any large enterprises before that aren’t software companies. Basically the business rolls dice and comes up with some random requirements and then tries to change those requirements constantly until you end up with software that looks so hideous nobody understands anything about it and all the chopping and changing leaves the code in a complete mess with lots of bugs. The problem is the people making these requests do not understand the costs, if they were building a house they wouldn’t dig up the foundations on a whim, but because software is so ephemeral it seems (to them at least) cost free.
InsomniacL 3y ago
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-... I have only skimmed this so far but it seems there were many bugs. Also this stood out to me. > 4. Fujitsu inserted transactions. These are injected into branch accounts by Fujitsu. They may be performed in order to ‘balance’ a discrepancy. These do NOT require acceptance by SPMs in the same manner as TCs and TAs.
- tauchunfall 3y ago
  >Fujitsu inserted transactions They inserted transactions for corrections of discrepancies where you could not see they were authored by them; it was just assumed the postmaster did. They did not let postmasters know about this; probably an order by the post office. These corrections where incorrect, and caused discrepancies to increase; they mixed plus and minus sign quite often. They added lines of code to the system running on the counter in the local post office. They used the message store system like wild west without defining a data schema.

InsomniacL 3y ago

What shocks me the most is the amount people who pleaded guilty (who claim they are innocent) to receive a lesser sentence. I'd equate that to torture.

Semaphor 3y ago
Isn’t that the general issue with plea deals? Unless you are wealthy, pleading out is often the better choice.
davedx 3y ago
The entire US criminal justice system revolves around plea bargains
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  For anyone who thinks the parent is exaggerating: 97% of all convictions in the US is due to the plea bargains.
SkyBelow 3y ago
This is why plea deals should be considered a violation of any notion of rights to a jury trial, fair trial, or similar. It is like the right to vote, where voting for the wrong party might end up with you going to prison.

sheepscreek 3y ago

I am absolutely flabbergasted. At least for American public companies, SOX compliance requirements make it impossible for something like this to ever happen without an explicit authorization in place. The rule is simple: every destructive action (think mutable) needs to have one requester and one approver. As long as it is logged in some system, you’re golden. This is somewhat enforced through regular publicly disclosed audits. I suppose that’s what Ernst and Young did when they noted in an audit that Fujitsu has unrestricted access to modify accounts without the postmasters knowledge, and this poses risk. What strikes me as bizarre is that no regulatory body took any action on that report. Maybe the report was private, I’m not sure - I don’t know how things work in the UK. In any case, this really takes your trust away from public institutions. You’re left to wonder, if this was possible, what else might still be possible?

mcguire 3y ago
I've worked on HR software for a large organization in the US that relatively frequently gets sued on hiring decisions. One of the features that the customer desired was essentially an overriding, free-form, editor for the recorded information, as part of the "get all of the information for a case to be submitted to the court" bit. We didn't do it, because the entire development team thought it was ridiculous, and the person requesting it retired before issue boiled over.

miohtama 3y ago

Here is the Wikipedia page on the topic. The issues started already in 90s and dragged without a proper fix, people committing suicides as the result https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#:~:text=The%20report%20described%20the%20Horizon,and%20old%20and%20unreliable%20hardware https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#....

mgkimsal 3y ago

Watched the Mr Bates 4 part series, and a few things didn't make much sense to me. The balancing. Perhaps because more was cash, but I would have expected some logging to have shown "at 4pm, the account had cash on hand of X pounds. at 4:08pm, the account had 2300 pounds less". Would that not have been useful? But watching (yes, it was a dramatization, but it didn't seem like much), it seems like PO did not want to admit any fault, ever, at all, and just kept sticking to that far beyond the time when they could have just cut their loss, held up their hands, and said "hey - problem identified, we'll fix it". If I sold 5000 pounds of stuff, and should have received 5000 pounds, and... I have 5000 pounds on hand, but the computer says I have a shortfall 1000 pounds... how is that defensible? Where did the money 'go'? If I had 4000 pounds on hand, but the computer then said I should have 6000, and I'm short 2000 pounds... why wasn't that discpreancy noted? Also.. what was the motivation behind all the changes? The whistleblower seemed to indicate this was remote people at horizon "fixing" things by hand. Were these all just 'accidents' no one owned up to? The drama seemed to indicate there was some intentional retaliation against some people, but it couldn't have been intentional in all cases. But also... it doesn't sound like anyone at Horizon stole that money, they were just changing figures in a system.

Marazan 3y ago
One of the bugs in the system was that one of the data entry screens which postmasters recorded their takings would routinely freeze. If you hit "Return" again whilst the screen was frozen it would silently submit the figures again. So if you had £4000 of takings and submitted, got the frozen screen bug and hit return again then the Post Office thought you had £8000 of takings. These were _incredibly obvious_ duplicate entry errors when the Post Office investigated but they blindly took the system as perfect and automatically assumed criminality on the part of the postmaster. NOTHING about this makes any sense if you assume people on the Post Office/Fujitsu side were acting in good faith.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  > These were _incredibly obvious_ duplicate entry errors when the Post Office investigated but they blindly took the system as perfect and automatically assumed criminality on the part of the postmaster They did not blindly take the system as perfect, but instead they were well aware of the errors and instead decided to bully the sub postmasters and gain bonuses for successful prosecution. They knew exactly what they were doing and took pains to hide any evidence of the shortcomings of Horizon.

dccoolgai 3y ago

I was wondering when this was going to breach the Zeitgeist. I've been reading about it for a while now. I'd really love to watch the recent show about it (that apparently triggered the awareness of it in the U.K.) but I can't find a way to watch it on any of my streaming services in the U.S. Does anyone know how to see it in the States?

dazc 3y ago
It was an ITV series which isn't a streaming service, as such. You may be able to access the Radio series though which is well worth a listen. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j
- JdeBP 3y ago
  ITVX is, purportedly, though. I have some relatives who tried out ITVX for the first time especially to watch the drama, which they didn't catch as it was broadcast. They reported that ITVX was almost unusable, and also that the app crashed their telly and caused it to lose the ability to output sound until they rebooted the telly and let it go through an update cycle. "BBC iPlayer is much better." came the grumble down the telephone. (-: I told them that it was ITV, which has 4 channels and is almost bound to repeat it.
  - JdeBP 3y ago
    Addendum: ITV duly repeated it, as predicted, 3 days after I wrote that; and the relatives tell me that they happily watched it on broadcast.
  - dazc 3y ago
    True, ITVX or whatever it was called before actually worked OK but then they updated it and made it quite terrible.
ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
I'd recommend pirating it and it's easy enough to find through the usual trackers.

yard2010 3y ago

After the latest bullshit from the BBC I can't trust anything they say, I need to check their sources on everything and honestly it's so tiring I just ignore their stuff. There are better sources for news. Like, credible sources

erinaceousjones 3y ago
This is an article that heavily mentions the BBC, the broadcaster of Panorama, being threatened by the Post Office. Other than the Panorama production company, whom chose to be interviewed by the BBC, in this instance where else would you go for a direct source? If I were to hazard a guess, you haven't chosen to read the article, and have no motivation to actually substantiate your distrust for them past a vague "it's bullshit".

cube00 3y ago

Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry Livestream https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947 https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947 Inquiry website https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk

capr 3y ago

but has any of this made any of you intelligent middle class people with best access to self-education ever doubt our social organization based on a monopoly on the use of violence in a geographical area?

krisoft 3y ago

I have a tangential question to this whole debacle: I'm a developer who worked on a lot of safety critical stuff. I think I know a lot about that. But never worked with "money stuff". What are the best practices in this regard? I understand this whole thing is not just a software development failure. But it also feels as if the Fujitsu developers had done a better job we wouldn't be having the whole debacle. So what are the best practices with a system like this? Are there good and practical books for example on the topic?

pjc50 3y ago
A good start might be the French "NF525" law, which lays down legal standards for how cash registers should work. https://www2.ikosoft.com/en-gb/all-knowledge-about-the-nf525-standard-for-cash-register-software/ https://www2.ikosoft.com/en-gb/all-knowledge-about-the-nf525... / https://www2.ikosoft.com/en-gb/cash-security-software-how-to-comply-with-standards-nf525/ https://www2.ikosoft.com/en-gb/cash-security-software-how-to... "Any software with nf certification must not allow any concealment of data essential for VAT assessment. It must be equipped with a system for identification and tracing of all processes and information relating to collections. Concerning the registration, the security is done by electronic signature. All information recorded in the cash register system cannot be modified or deleted. Errors and returns are automatically considered as new transactions. As regards the retention of data, the minimum period imposed by the standard is six years. Furthermore, during a tax audit, an archiving system must facilitate the interventions of the tax authorities, by quickly restoring the data necessary for the calculation of VAT. Note that archiving is systematic before any purging procedure. This rule ensures that the data is available at each intervention of the administration’s agents." It's perhaps a bit more like signed git commits than blockchain; the requirement is that every transaction be signed and immutable. If "corrections" are required, the correction has to be appended to the log leaving the original in place. I believe there's also a requirement to feed all this receipt data to the tax authorities.

codeulike 3y ago

Here's a system audit manual from Jan 2000, part of the inquiry evidence. Lets figure out how this thing worked. https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/pol00029165-icl-pathway-horizon-system-audit-manual-csr-v13 https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/pol0002...

duncans 3y ago
See also the Fujitsu whistleblower, Richard Rolls’ witness statement https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/witn00780100-richard-roll-witness-statement https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/witn007...
tauchunfall 3y ago
There is also a detailed description of the system in [1]. An interesting incidence/problem report is in [2] at 1h:03m:00s, where an replication error in their Riposte message store system is described. After a defect counter hardware was replaced, it will fill its empty store with messages from other counters. [1] "Technical Appendix to Judgment (No.6) “Horizon Issues”", https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/bates-v-post-office-appendix-1-1.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/bates-v-... [2] "Alvin Finch - Richard Coleman - Day 54 AM (17 May 2023) - Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0_-ebCVU5k&t=3780 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0_-ebCVU5k&t=3780 [3] Steven Murdoch: "What went wrong with Horizon: learning from the Post Office Trial", https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2021/07/15/what-went-wrong-with-horizon-learning-from-the-post-office-trial/ https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2021/07/15/what-went-wrong-with...

arkh 3y ago

The thing is: the higher ups thinking that postmasters where routinely stealing and the fact Fujitsu altering records without logging was standard shows a culture where you can bet those higher ups are used to steal and think everyone does it.

menzoic 3y ago

This couldn't happen if the transactions were on a blockchain

greggsy 3y ago
Or better accounting, testing, logging and administration standards, which would be necessary with or without blockchain.

lagerlagerlager 3y ago

ICL originally had contract AFAIK. It seems to me that the disappeared funds could have gone to people with access to the system and not just a result of accidental coding. International Computers Limited existed as a commercial entity and brand from 1968 to 2002, it was finally and completely absorbed into Fujitsu.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
> It seems to me that the disappeared funds could have gone to people with access to the system How could that happen outside of the Post Office? ICL/Fujitsu had remote access to all the remote boxes and could add/amend records without any audit trail and without knowledge of the sub postmasters, but I can't see how they could get money to go into their own pockets unless they entered into a deal with the sub postmaster operating the branch. Hypothetically, they could delete some transactions and then the sub postmaster would have more money in their till than accounted for and could split the proceeds. (I don't think this ever happened).
joe463369 3y ago
The disappeared funds were briefly covered in the programme. Standard accountancy practice when you've got mystery funds is to record them in a 'suspense account' and if it comes to light where the dough came from, you update your records. If no one comes forward after x years you just have to treat it as free money from who-knows-where.

iandanforth 3y ago

Is the Post Office a private company? Why are they using phrases like 'protect our brand?'

JdeBP 3y ago
Yes, Post Office Ltd is a private company. It was privatized at the turn of the 21st century, and there are odd holdovers from the four centuries of it being a royal monopoly with sweeping powers, more on which at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076.

zh3 3y ago

What is clear about this is that the system couldn't even balance the books (which has been obvious for years, to anyone in the UK following the story). If the computer says "You took £x thousand and only banked £Y thousand", the first thing to do is audit the receipts and (unless there were fraudulent entries being made, while noting this was allegedly not possible) as the first rule of forensic accounting is 'follow the money'. What's so bad here is that the executives of a well respected UK institution acted purely from a profit/reputational motive, and dug themselves deeper and deeper into the hole as a result. More scarey part of this is that it's Minority Report - "Computer says you're guilty, end of story". Positive take would be the courts are less likely to believe the 'computers are infallible' line in the future.

spondyl 3y ago

Some important context that might be useful for fellow confused readers: A new four-part dramatisation about the Horizon scandal aired from January 1st - 4th in the UK. As a result, the scandal became a popular topic for discussion publically and in the media, as well as introducing the issue to a whole bunch of people who were unaware I was a bit confused myself as to why this was getting coverage out of the blue until I learned about the ITV series yesterday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office

chris_wot 3y ago

Why would anyone allow Fujitsu to gain new contracts?