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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. Accord

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
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- 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.
greggsy 3y ago
They were bullied and given leniency if they didn’t speak ill of the shortcomings

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.

greggsy 3y ago

They were bullied and given leniency if they didn’t speak ill of the shortcomings