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At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

675 points by xbryanx 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
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belter 1y ago
Some context: "How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives" - 2024 | 331 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39010070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39010070 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=post%20office%20scandal&sort=byPopularity https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=uk%20post%20office&sort=byPopularity https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
bmacho 1y ago
https://archive.md/oldest/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/world/europe/uk-post-office-scandal-report.html https://archive.md/oldest/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10...
deleted 1y ago
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ignoramous 1y ago
Another post office operator, Seema Misra, was pregnant when she was sent to prison. She said in testimony that the local newspaper had published a photo of her and labeled her the "pregnant thief." While she was in prison, her husband was beaten up and subjected to racist insults, she testified. The tidal wave of fascist & far-right grievances are so hard to contain and fight against in the moment. Multi-cultural societies everywhere are never getting rid of it, are they?
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  At the moment yes but always has been in the UK.
- Nasrudith 1y ago
  Blaming the grievances on multiculturalism is yet another lie on the never-ending pile of lies that is fascism. If everyone was a literal clone from the same insular culture, fascism will invent new distinctions to create outgroups to oppress.
  - tumsfestival 1y ago
    After race it's religion, when it's not religion it's politics, when it's not politics it's social class... It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if we will ever achieve anything like the Star Trek future where we just get past racism and bigotry. I have a feeling bigotry will be our great filter as a species.
XCabbage 1y ago
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- deleted 1y ago
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- throw_m239339 1y ago
  It's the euphemism treadmill in action. It's like how "undocumented residents", which replaced "illegal aliens" in the media, now has a negative connotation anyway, so mainstream media are now trying to find a new word that doesn't sound "offensive"... but the very concept is loaded by definition, so no amount of euphemism is going to change that.
  - anonymars 1y ago
    My take: as long as the thing being described connotes some lower status, change the term all you want and it will still be "uncomfortable" Negro, black, African American, person of color... it's not the term, it's the implication. Solve the fact that the treatment is that of second-class citizens and there won't be a need to create new terms. ("But that's hard and as an individual I feel powerless so instead I will use a different term I guess." Probably the same phenomenon causing people to direct energy against vaccines more than pollutants and chemicals) "Disabled", "handicapped", "differently-abled" -- we've never needed to rename "tall", have we?
- kayodelycaon 1y ago
  “Died by suicide” is not new. I heard it 30 years ago as a kid. Many, many professional organizations use clinical language around suicide because it’s always been a sensitive topic. You also see this everywhere in when people use euphemism instead of saying it directly.
  - arp242 1y ago
    https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Died+by+suicide&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Died+by+suicid... Bloody woke libtards in Victorian era!
nextos 1y ago
I have followed this scandal quite closely over the years, and these two quotations sum it up. Pretty sad: "The report alleges that even before the program was rolled out in 1999, some Fujitsu employees knew that Horizon could produce false data." "As the years went by the complaints grew louder and more persistent [...] Still the Post Office trenchantly resisted the contention that on occasions Horizon produced false data."
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  the employee knew something going to fuck up but higher up maybe don't want to deal with clean up and proceed to release it asap hmm sounds like silicon valley work ethics
- nlitened 1y ago
  It would not surprise me if some developers at that time reported to journalists that they had a bug in their code, they'd go to jail for fabricating evidence, cybercrime, stealing of trade secrets, breaking an NDA, or something like that.
  - hungmung 1y ago
    Why not all of the above?
mike_hearn 1y ago
To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details of what happened by making it sound like a natural disaster. Horizon is the case that should replace Therac-25 as a study in what can go wrong if software developers screw up. Therac-25 injured/killed six people, Horizon has ruined hundreds of lives and ended dozens. And the horrifying thing is, Horizon wasn't something anyone would have previously identified as safety-critical software. It was just an ordinary point-of-sale and accounting system. The suicides weren't directly caused by the software, but from an out of control justice and social system in which people blindly believed in public institutions that were actually engaged in a massive deep state cover-up. It is reasonable to blame the suicides on the legal and political system that allowed the Post Office to act in that way, and which put such low quality people in charge. Perhaps also on the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't. But this is HN, so from a software engineering perspective what can be learned? Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight. But most were bugs due to loss of transactionality or lack of proper auditing controls. Think message replays lacking proper idempotency, things like that. Transactions were logged that never really occurred, and when the cash was counted some appeared to be missing, so the Post Office accused the postmasters of stealing from the business. They hadn't done so, but this took place over decades, and decades ago people had more faith in institutions than they do now. And these post offices were often in small villages where the post office was the center of the community, so the false allegations against postmasters were devastating to their social and business lives. Put simply - check your transactions! And make sure developers can't rewrite databases in prod.
- SirFatty 1y ago
  "The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. " That's a really odd take.
Horffupolde 1y ago
Suicide is a verb and result by itself. Would the author also say “he died by murder”?
- ellisv 1y ago
  They are simplify avoiding using the word "committed" using a well accepted alternative because of the connotation with criminal behavior. But no they would say "died by homicide" not "died by murder".
  - docdeek 1y ago
    Would they not say "was killed" and so allow "killed himself/herself"?
  - Tostino 1y ago
    Maybe "were driven to suicide by..." to properly describe the situation?
- cjs_ac 1y ago
  This trend for commenting on news articles with nothing to say but a complaint about the wording of the headline is tedious. The right to free speech does not impose a responsibility to say something about everything you see.
  - thoroughburro 1y ago
    Your argument is that the wording of headlines is so meaningless as to always be beneath comment? Seems silly.
  - bendigedig 1y ago
    I think you're missing the point by a mile. The point isn't some tedious debate over grammar; it's about the choice of language that perpetuates the idea that suicide is a tragedy that happens passively 'to people' in some kind of tragic, medicalised, incomprehensible way which is severed from any socio-political context. In this case, these people were driven to suicide. I would argue that those responsible for the Horizon scandal are guilty of at minimum manslaughter of these poor people.
throw_m239339 1y ago
What a horrible story. What can you do when you know you are innocent but the court trusts the software more than it trusts people? And you are asked to repay something you never stole which off course leads to your financial ruin/divorce/... your kids bullied because you as a parent were deemed a thief... Imagine your spouse leaving you because of something you didn't even do... Someone absolutely needs to go to jail over this. This kind of software is supposed to go through a lengthy compliance and certification process, so clearly whatever person put their signature on that "certified" document is responsible for these death.
throw0101c 1y ago
The four-part mini-series Mr Bates vs The Post Office is worth checking out: > A faulty IT system called Horizon, developed by Fujitsu, creates apparent cash shortfalls that cause Post Office Limited to pursue prosecutions for fraud, theft and false accounting against a number of subpostmasters across the UK. In 2009, a group of these, led by Alan Bates, forms the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. The prosecutions and convictions are later ruled a miscarriage of justice at the conclusion of the Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd judicial case in 2019.[4][5] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office
- ThisNameIsTaken 1y ago
  What is particularly striking about the scandal is the impact of the mini-series. From what I understand (as a foreigner to the UK) is that it was the mini-series that sparked national interest in the case. Without it, those involved would still be in a bureaucratic and legal nightmare, in which all institutions rejected their innocence claims, and hardly anyone would have been held accountable. See also the "Impact" section on the linked wiki page. It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.
  - duncans 1y ago
    It's worth pointing out that Mr Bates vs The Post Office screened in early 2024. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry was set up in 2020/2021 and the public hearings started in 2023. So it may have looked like "it was TV what done it" but the wheels of justice were turning long before the show came out.
    - penguin_booze 1y ago
      Wheels; justice: all these are just weasel words. Litigation is an exclusive privilege of the rich. And prison, of the poor(er).
    - worik 1y ago
lboc 1y ago
A good summary from the UK IT trade publication that broke the story: https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-Office-Horizon-scandal-explained-everything-you-need-to-know https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-Office-Horizon-s... Not sure if this requires sign-in/subscription, so apologies in advance. I did neither and have access to the full article.
- comprev 1y ago
  Paywall removed: https://archive.ph/OZeED https://archive.ph/OZeED
mrkramer 1y ago
I thought British legal system and computer forensics were serious but this case is just a travesty of justice.
- closewith 1y ago
  The British legal system is and always has been a litany of injustices dressed up in formal attire. To be avoided at all costs.
  - mathiaspoint 1y ago
    That mess inspired the American legal system though, which is probably one of if not the best in the world. IMO common law is still better than case law at least.
    - closewith 1y ago
      > That mess inspired the American legal system though, which is probably one of if not the best in the world. Poe's Law strikes again. The American legal system isn't even the best legal system in the US.
      - nusaru 1y ago
        > in the US Huh? What does this mean? Are there other systems in the US that I’m not aware of?
        closewith 1y ago
        Yes, the indigenous domestic nations.
        renewiltord 1y ago
        Indeed, and science can’t account for the wonders of indigenous ways of thinking either.
cedws 1y ago
The failing is as much with the court as it is with Fujitsu. Why did they blindly accept Horizon’s data as evidence? What if the computer said the Queen stole all the money and ran off to Barbados, would they have thrown her in jail? Why was the output of a black box, which may as well have been a notebook Fujitsu could have written anything they wanted into, treated as gospel?
- rwmj 1y ago
  The actual answer to this is terrible. Courts had to trust the computer was correct. There was a common law presumption that a computer was operating correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary (and getting that evidence is basically impossible for the individuals being charged who were post office workers, not computer experts, and the source code was a trade secret). This might change, partly in response to this case: https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/use-of-evidence-generated-by-software-in-criminal-proceedings/use-of-evidence-generated-by-software-in-criminal-proceedings-call-for-evidence https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/use-of-evid... Quite interesting article about this: https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/the-presumption-that-computers-are-reliable https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/the-presumption-t...
  - imtringued 1y ago
    The emperor has no clothes. Oxford is the worlds AI Safety research hub and yet they didn't think about campaigning to overturn a law which negates their entire reason for existing?
    - PaulRobinson 1y ago
      This happened a long time before the current resurgence in AI.
      - silon42 1y ago
        Imagine how much will "machine is right and can't be changed" happen with AI.
RedShift1 1y ago
What was the actual bug in the software that caused the accounting errors?
- renewiltord 1y ago
  From the wording of the description of the programmer who failed to debug and labeled it user error it appears that it is fairly typical Accenture-grade software where there is no single bug so much as the program itself approximates the correct result. Their data model appears to have been akin to having a single accumulator sum up things rather than to use something like double-entry bookkeeping or an account graph so that the source of errors could be traced. It’s less “a bug” and more a coincidence that the application worked when it did.
  - RedShift1 1y ago
    So the errors could be down to using floats instead of decimal types?
    - renewiltord 1y ago
      It could be that. It could be that they just have separate code paths for measuring "amount in" and "amount reported" with an if-clause missing in one and present in the other. From the description the debugging programmer provides, it doesn't look like they had any sort of coherent design.
- wolfgang42 1y ago
  The judge’s report[1] lists twenty-eight different classes of failure, including: - Confusing and buggy UI causing clerks to duplicate or mis-enter transactions - Inventory getting “stuck” in branches after the product was discontinued; the attempt to remove it hid the inventory but caused its value to reappear on the books again each accounting period - Failing touch screens entering spurious purchases overnight - Incomplete rollback of distributed transactions - Byzantine failures during hardware replacement causing multiple transactions to be assigned the same ID and overwrite each other - Fujitsu employees with unaudited write access to the production database making one-off modifications - The point of sale system simply telling the clerk to give too much change back to the customer There’s no “one bug” here; the main failure was that those responsible continued to dismiss any problems as users being either in error or outright malicious, despite massive amounts of evidence that the system had technical flaws. Better quality software would have reduced the problems, but no system is bug-free and in many cases very little effort was made to identify the root causes of problems, much less to prevent similar ones from happening again. [1] 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-...
asdefghyk 1y ago
I worked as a software test analysist (technical tester) for 20 years for a company that processed large amounts of money ( millions of gambling transactions) Our testing had to produce documented repeatable test cases and test evidence of correct software system operation. My company had to pay third party independent software auditors who would examine the software in the test results in ay way they wanted. This involved re running some of our tests and specific tests requested by the auditor. These audits could range from a few hours to several days depending on the software change. Auditors would prepare a report for the government department. If there was no repeatable test case and test evidence recorded than the software was regarded as not tested, Making the tests repeatable would sometimes involve in considerable test data setup. My point is the defense should have kept digging and ask for test evidence that software had been such tested. ( On busy days, the companies software could process $100m or more transactions with transaction speeds of 1000 or more a second, so such testing was important)
hyperman1 1y ago
I'd love to see a technical analysis of what went wrong with the software and what to do about it. Similar to when airplanes crash etc... This is another case like Therac-25 that should be tought in every IT master class.
- rwmj 1y ago
  I did read a very technical report about this which obviously now I can't find :-( My takeaways were: (1) They didn't bother with double-entry bookkeeping. (2) It was a distributed system which no one fully understood and was not based on any normal distributed system principles. (3) Developers made ad hoc changes to the code and even database to temporarily patch things up, even going so far as to hard-code database ids into special cases throughout the code. Edit: I think this one: 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-... Also related article: 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...
secondcoming 1y ago
The inquiry into this scandal was live streamed on Youtube. You had lawyers quizzing people from all ranks of the Post Office and Fujistu; very interesting. Ever since, I’ve worded my work related electronic communications with the supposition that a lawyer may read them at some point in the future. If I’m ever asked to do something seemingly unusual or ‘out of the box’, it must be put to me in writing.
parados 1y ago
Here is the original source for this article. Warning: it is a tough read, particularly section 3.c "Case Illustrations": https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2025-07/Post%20Office%20Horizon%20IT%20Inquiry%20Final%20Report%20Volume%201.pdf https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/fi...
throwawayHpCvfn 1y ago
As someone who attempted suicide almost ten years ago, I'm disheartened by how cold-hearted the comments on this article are. Accusations of certain wording being "woke" or "PC" and completely ignoring the substance of the article itself, as if the wording were the tragedy here. If we must have this discussion, I stopped using the phrase "committed suicide" when I found out it was a relic of when it was illegal and stigmatized by the justice system. I prefer "died by suicide", and I appreciate when others use it too. Not in the sense that I will correct people when they say committed (because most people, the ones in this comment section excepted, don't know the origins), but rather "oh hey, that person knows about this, and they care too."
- whycome 1y ago
  I think the discussion is that “driven to suicide” would be a more appropriate term. Their deaths were not coincidental or incidental. It is an attempt to acknowledge that their act was the result of the actions of the post office and others.
  - throwawayHpCvfn 1y ago
    A few comments are like that, yes, and I have no objections to that description. Most of the discussion though seems to be more like this: > I guess some people take comfort in the idea that suicide is thrust on people and they take no responsibility for their actions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44531844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44531844
- Mordisquitos 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - throwawayHpCvfn 1y ago
    Me: "Hey, I survived a suicide attempt several years ago, and I appreciate it when people who know the negative history behind 'committing suicide' say something else, because it shows that they care." You (pre-edit): "The problem many of us see with saying 'unalived by suicide' rather than 'committed suicide' is the artificiality of the sentence and the implication that the language we speak has to keep up with the correct newspeak due to the latest euphemistic moral cleansing lest we appear uncouth and uncultured." My point stands.
cletus 1y ago
People should go to jail for this. Anyone who has worked on a large migration eventually lands on a pattern that goes something like this: 1. Double-write to the old system and the new system. Nothing uses the new system; 2. Verify the output in the new system vs the old system with appropriate scripts. If there are issues, which there will be for awhile, go back to (1); 3. Start reading from the new system with a small group of users and then an increasingly large group. Still use the old system as the source of truth. Log whenever the output differs. Keep making changes until it always matches; 4. Once you're at 100% rollout you can start decomissioning the old system. This approach is incremental, verifiable and reversible. You need all of these things. If you engage in a massive rewrite in a silo for a year or two you're going to have a bad time. If you have no way of verifying your new system's output, you're going to have a bad time. In fact, people are going to die, as is the case here. If you're going to accuse someone of a criminal act, a system just saying it happened should NEVER be sufficient. It should be able to show its work. The person or people who are ultimately responsible for turning a fraud detection into a criminal complaint should themselves be criminally liable if they make a false complaint. We had a famous example of this with Hertz mistakenly reporting cars stolen, something they ultimately had to pay for in a lawsuit [1] but that's woefully insufficient. It is expensive, stressful and time-consuming to have to criminally defend yourself against a felony charge. People will often be forced to take a plea because absolutely everything is stacked in the prosecution's favor despite the theoretical presumption of innocence. As such, an erroneous or false criminal complaint by a company should itself be a criminal charge. In Hertz's case, a human should eyeball the alleged theft and look for records like "do we have the car?", "do we know where it is?" and "is there a record of them checking it in?" In the UK post office scandal, a detection of fraud from accounting records should be verified by comparison to the existing system in a transition period AND, moreso in the beginning, double checking results with forensic accountants (actual humans) before any criminal complaint is filed. [1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusation-stealing-cars-settlement https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
akudha 1y ago
This was depressing to read. Failures at so many levels. 1. Immediately after Horizon was rolled out, issues were reported. But ignored 2. Prosecutors didn't bother to verify if there is another explanation before accusing thousands of people of stealing? Isn't it common sense to pause for a second and think, "could we please double check the evidence? how can thousands of postal workers suddenly turn into thieves?" 3. local newspaper had published a photo of her and labeled her the “pregnant thief.” - of course, UK tabloids. Click baits and write whatever the fuck they want, no matter whose lives are destroyed 4. post office has said that it does not have the means to provide redress for that many people - so they have the means to falsely prosecute and destroy the lives of thousands of people, but they don't have the means to correct their blunders? This happened more than a decade ago. Citizens are expected to do everything on time (pay taxes, renew drivers license...) or get fined/jailed, but the government can sit on their butt for 10 YEARS and do nothing about a blunder they caused? What about Fujitsu? Why can't the government make Fujitsu pay for the destruction caused by their shitty software? Jeez. This is just fucking nuts
- dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
  >Failures at so many levels. Describes pretty much the vast majority of people. All groups/institutions/enterprises made of such people will follow a similar path. Point being - there is no hope.
- PaulRobinson 1y ago
  I suggest you keep an eye on what's being published in Private Eye and Computer Weekly if you have access to those where you are. They're holding feet to the fire on all these points. One thing I would say is that if somebody is convicted in the UK, it's acceptable legally and culturally to call them by the crime they committed. The problem is that in this case the Post Office had unique legal powers, and was being run by people who did not want to "harm the brand" by admitting they had made mistakes, so kept digging. There is also a fundamental flaw in how the courts - and the Post Office prosecutors - were instructed to think about the evidence in common law. Bizarrely, it was not (and may still not), be an acceptable defense to say that computer records are wrong. They are assumed correct in UK courts. IT systems were legally considered infallible, and if your evidence contradicts an IT systems evidence, you were considered a liar by the court, and a jury might be instructed accordingly. Yes, that's awful. Yes, it's ruined lives. But also, I think all involved have realised pointing fingers at one or two individuals to blame hasn't really helped fix things. Like an air accident, you have to have several things go wrong and compound errors to get into this amount of trouble, normally. There were systemic failing across procurement, implementation, governance, investigations, prosecutions, within the justice system and beyond. I already know people who have worked for Fujitsu in the UK are not exactly shouting about it. And yet, they're still getting awarded contracts before the compensation has been paid out...
duncans 1y ago
What is amazing is the engineers the Fujitsu employed would testify in court against some of the subpostmasters saying "there were no faults" where in unearthed evidence of their support logs they could be clearly acknowledging bugs that could create false accounts, manually updating records and audit logs to balance it out (and also sometimes screwing that up). See Nick Wallis' coverage: * https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html * https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/ecce-chambers/ https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/ecce-chambers/ > [Anne] Chambers closed the ticket with a definitive: “No fault in product”. > The cause of the defect was assigned to “User” – that is, the Subpostmaster. > When Beer asked why, Chambers replied: “Because I was rather frustrated by not – by feeling that I couldn’t fully get to the bottom of it. But there was no evidence for it being a system error.” ... > Chambers conceded: “something was obviously wrong, in that the branch obviously were getting these discrepancies that they weren’t expecting, but all I could see on my side was that they were apparently declaring these differing amounts, and I certainly didn’t know of any system errors that would cause that to happen, or that would take what they were declaring and not record it correctly…. so I felt, on balance, there was just no evidence of a system error.” > No evidence. [Sir Wyn] Williams pointed out that it surely was unlikely to be a user error if both trainers and auditors had recorded the Subpostmaster as inputting information correctly. Chambers replied: > “Well, yeah, I… yes, I don’t know why… I’m not happy with this one. But I still stand by there being no indication of a system error and the numbers that they were recording just didn’t make a lot of sense.”
- justin66 1y ago
  Pretty sure I can guess the answer, but: does the UK have professional licensure for "software engineers?"
  - petesergeant 1y ago
    Yes, software engineers can become Chartered Engineers via the BCS: https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/get-registered/chartered-engineer-ceng/ https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/get-registe... Has anyone, ever? I've met precisely one.
SCdF 1y ago
Effectively tortured to death. One of the things that frustrates me with how ethics is taught in computer science is that we use examples like Therac 25, and people listen in horror, then their takeaway is frequently "well thank god I don't work on medical equipment". The fact that it's medical equipment is a distraction. All software can cause harm to others. All of it. You need to care about all of it.
- whycome 1y ago
  That’s why the “died by suicide” language can be problematic. These people were driven by several factors and they were left with no choice.
  - arrowsmith 1y ago
    "Driven to suicide" may be more accurate. And damning.
- jedimastert 1y ago
  Jesus I desperately wish real ethics classes were required for computer science degrees
  - lmm 1y ago
    The best available evidence is that ethics classes reduce ethical behaviour.
    - jedimastert 1y ago
      I'm going to need a source on that
  - UK-AL 1y ago
    In the UK they are I think? Well if they want to be BCS accredited.
  - izacus 1y ago
    Ethic classes are pointless without ethical liability and accountability of people causing suffering. Yes, even the Jira javascript ticket punchers hould be accountable for what they do.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44499498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44499498
jekwoooooe 1y ago
[flagged]
exiguus 1y ago
I became aware of this fraud involving Fujitsu/Horizon and the UK Post Office at the beginning of this year because I watched the movie 'Mr. Bates vs The Post Office.' I can recommend it. It's sad to see all these people losing their livelihoods and beliefs. And it gives me hope to see how they fought back and started to help each other over the decades.
jordanb 1y ago
I went on a deep dive on this scandal about a year or so ago. One thing that struck me is the class element. Basically, the Post Office leadership could not understand why someone would buy a PO franchise. It's a substantial amount of money up front, and people aren't allowed to buy multiple franchises, so every PO was an owner/operator position. Essentially people were "buying a job". The people in leadership couldn't understand why someone would buy the opportunity to work long hours at a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary at the end of the year. They assumed that there must be a real reason why people were signing up and the real reason was to put their hands in the till. So they ended up assuming the postmasters were stealing, and the purpose of the accounting software was to detect the fraud so it could be prosecuted. When the accounting software started finding vast amounts of missing funds, they ignored questions about the software because it was working as intended. I bet if the opposite had happened, and it found very little fraud, they would have become suspicious of the software because their priors were that the postmasters were a bunch of thieves.
- imtringued 1y ago
  This is utterly illogical. Who in their right mind would commit a crime with a 100% probability of getting caught? This isn't a classic embezzlement of public funds, where the people receiving the money are also the people deciding whether it was well spent or not and hence could easily divert some of the money through behind the scenes deals with contractors without getting caught. The "embezzlement" here is on the level of getting an invoice and not paying it.
- hnfong 1y ago
  Fascinating. Do you have references for the motives/biases of the PO leadership?
  - jordanb 1y ago
    My entry-point was listening to this podcast, it's pretty long but it goes into the fact that the purpose of horizon was to detect fraud and reduce shrinkage, that the leadership and their consultants were coming up with outsized estimates for the amount of fraud and using that as financial justification for the project. They also talk about postmaster's motivations for buying a franchise and how sitting behind a retail desk in a small town with a modest but steady income is actually one of the best outcomes available to the type of working-class Briton who was buying the franchise. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j
cman82 1y ago
For an excellent in-depth look at the scandal, I recommend Nick Wallis's book The Great Post Office Scandal. I read this soon after it came out and was wondering why it hadn't caused a national uproar. It was only the miniseries that prompted the required outrage.
- rossant 1y ago
  Yes, many scandals stay under the radar until a good book, film or series reaches millions at once. I hope the same happens with another subject close to my heart [1, 2]. A Netflix film on a related topic a few years ago already had a huge impact [3]. It focused on one case, but by the end of the movie it is clear that many others are similarly affected. [1] https://cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-shaken-baby-syndrome-abusive-head-trauma-controversy/ https://cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-shaken-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Care_of_Maya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Care_of_Maya
nickelpro 1y ago
The bug is hardly the problem here, it is necessary but far from sufficient for something like this to happen. The UK legal system's ability to prosecute and penalize people without anything more than circumstantial evidence makes it unfit for purpose. It should be an embarrassment to a country that considers itself a member of the developed Western world.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >The UK legal system's ability to prosecute and penalize people without anything more than circumstantial evidence makes it unfit for purpose. This defect is present in all justice systems to some degree or another. For that matter, most crimes (serious or otherwise) rarely have the sort of smoking gun evidence that would satisfy us all that it wasn't circumstantial. Worse still, when the evidence isn't circumstantial, it's still usually testimonial in nature... some witness is on the stand at trial, describing what they saw. Or, perhaps more accurately, misinterpreting what they saw/remember. The only difference this time around is that they were misinterpreting what their software logic meant.
  - nickelpro 1y ago
    I recommend you read the report. The charges were brought solely on the claimed accounting shortfalls with no further evidence that the postmasters and sub-postmasters did anything wrong, not even an attempt to discover where the money had gone or anything resembling forensic accounting that would be required in similar US cases. In the most shocking case, with Martin Griffiths, there were attempts to hold him responsible for robbery loses he had absolutely nothing to do with: > On 2 May 2013 a robbery occurred at the Post Office which resulted in a net loss to the Post Office of £38,504.96, which was reduced to £15,845 after some of the money was recovered. Mr Griffiths was injured during the robbery; he was present in the branch when it occurred. The Post Office Investigator advised the Post Office that Mr Griffiths was partly to blame for the loss sustained by the Post Office and that he should be held responsible for part of the loss. [1] Such a claim wouldn't even be colorable in most jurisdictions. I disagree that anything similar could happen at this scale in the US or France. Individual cases might not be handled perfectly, but this is a systemic miscarriage of justice where at every turn individuals were prosecuted without any evidence of individual wrongdoing. It was believed money was missing, no attempt was made to discover how it went missing, and the post-masters were held responsible without further inquiry. The legal system upheld these non-findings as facts and convicted people based upon them. [1]: Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, 3.49
kypro 1y ago
I know this is only tangentially relevant, but as someone who lives in the UK the inhuman and process driven nature of the way the state operates today is terrifying to me. Several times in recent years I've had people significantly financially and emotionally affected by what amounts to just fairly minor errors of judgement that the state treats as deliberate criminal acts and will follow up on with absolutely no human judgement or compassion. An obvious example of this is tax law which despite being extremely complicated is followed by the state with no human consideration for individual circumstances. I guess upper-middle-class people must just know from osmosis every letter of UK tax code, but I've had so many people in my family not realise that they need to fill tax returns for certain things like Bitcoin disposals, OnlyFans earnings, eBay gains, income from helping neighbours with building/gardening work, etc... And the state can be absolutely fucking brutal when you make a mishap like this. They do not give a crap about intention or whether you've otherwise been a law abiding citizen. Case in point is HMRCs name and shame list which I believe was intended to name and shame high-profile tax evaders, but has basically just become a list of working class dudes who (perhaps stupidly in our eyes) didn't realise they had to manually file tax returns on their income. Even extremely mediocre things are treated with brutal enforcement... For example, a street by mine recently changed from 30mph to 20mph overnight and this resulted in literally thousands of people being caught exceeding the speed limit by 10mph. There was no understanding that these people obviously didn't expect the speed limit to randomly change over night, instead they were all sent a letter from the government stating the government's intent to prosecute them for their offence... Any human would have thought, hm, yeah the fact thousands of people were caught when we made this change might imply that people didn't deliberately exceed the speed limit but we didn't make it clear enough that it had changed. Obviously this is a totally different magnitude to what these people went through, but again I think it's all a result of overly systematic rule following that makes people feel completely powerless when the state decides they've done something wrong. There's absolutely nothing you can do to say, "hey, you know me... I wouldn't do this. You've made a mistake." Nope, sorry computer says no, and that's the end of it. I get what I'm suggesting here isn't practical and this is just a side-effect of a large state which must depersonalise and systematise everything, but when you're a person caught on the wrong side of that system it's fucking scary because no one will listen to you or relate to you as a human being. And everyone you talk to can ruin your life at the click of a button and you know it's their job to do it when the system tells them that's what they must do. Obviously these people had some legal assumption of innocence, but on a human level the assumption was always that they couldn't be trusted and were criminals. If you've ever experienced this before, where it's just assumed that you are guilty because of some faulty or misleading information it's psychologically brutal. You feel helpless, powerless and you're treated as if you lack humanity. It's horrible feeling and completely unsurprising to me these people decided to do the only thing they could reasonably do to take back control of their lives. Sadly we'll learn nothing from this.
lysace 1y ago
I was curious so I looked into it: It looks like about 10x the average UK suicide rate (assuming "the worst case": all male, 40+ over about a decade. In reality some percentage of the about 1000 wrongfully accused will be female, of course).
foota 1y ago
This is horrifying.
arresin 1y ago
There is something very rotten about this country. It’s like the heart of it has rotted out totally.
horizion2025 1y ago
A big issue is that the British post office could itself act as the prosecutor. Other entities reporting a crime need to convince the public prosecutor before there even is a case, but due to hundred years old traditions the Post Office had the right act as its own prosecutor. Effectively the same problem as in the LLoyd's scandal where LLoyd's effectively was its own regulator.
phendrenad2 1y ago
We've chased all of the smart people out of government. You're more likely to find a smart person working as a cook the local fried chicken restaurant than you are to find one in government. It has to be said. And you'll all find that it's true if you pay attention. Those of you who have been paying attention already noticed this.
Nifty3929 1y ago
What boggles my mind is that so many of us still thing more government is the way to address problems. The fact is, humans are human, and work in both government and in business. But a business cannot put you in jail or unilaterally freeze all your money. A business can accuse you of a crime, but they will be very careful before they do as the consequences of bring wrong are very severe - for a business. Corporations can fire you or sell your data or send you targeted adds. But the risks associated with government are far worse.
monksy 1y ago
Don't forget her name: Paula Vennells (Royal Mail CEO). She went on record to state there was no issue despite reports. I'm sure we're see justice for her actions. /s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells Remember her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPYo_gq329w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPYo_gq329w
- tjpnz 1y ago
  I haven't. She's yet to face any real consequences too. Thoroughly despicable.
- dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
  She alone is not to blame, she's doing what a psychopath is expected to do. Blame people who gave her that power and did not monitor her abuse of the power she had.
- martin-t 1y ago
  Lying should be punishable according to max(expected harm, indended harm, actual harm). Making factual statements from a position of power without making sure they are correct is lying.
- game_the0ry 1y ago
  Wow, that video was hard to watch. She needs to go to jail yesterday.
patrickdavey 1y ago
I think that "Mr Bates vs the post office" (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27867155/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27867155/) should be required watching for software developers. It was an internal developer bearing witness that made a material difference here. If you're the developer logging in to fix errors and the postmaster scandal is in full swing, then it's time to look at being a whistleblower. If you're the developer writing code to hack emissions tests in cars, again, look at your ethics.
ta555555 1y ago
I don't understand why people kill the victim rather than the person who made them a victim, especially when they are the victim. These people know that are being wronged. These people know the wrongdoing is life-destroying...
lesser-shadow 1y ago
U.K gov try not to be hilariously evil challenge:impossible. But honestly I'm not even slightly surprised as this is coming from the same "people" who invented the window tax.
rmk 1y ago
This is why there should be tort law in England and other common law locales.
hermitcrab 1y ago
This is a disgraceful story from start to finish. Many of the postmasters have still not been compensated and no-one in the post office or Fujitsu has been properly held to account yet, all these years later. In fact most of them have retired on big pensions. Paula Vennels was nearly parachuted in as a Bishop. The UK tax payer is footing the compensation bill. And Fujitsu continue to get fat contracts from the British Government. Kudos to Alan Bates, Private Eye, Computer Weekly and a few others who fought many years to get this far. But justice has still not been done.
hermitcrab 1y ago
This whole scandal has been exposed partly due to the dogged work of journalists at Private Eye over many years. Private Eye is also very funny, with some very good cartoons. Please consider taking out a subscription to Private Eye, to support investigative journalism - even if you only read the cartoons.
- comprev 1y ago
  Private Eye might be humorous but they're also very respected for their journalistic integrity. They will expose scandals and wrongdoing which many publications would buckle under pressure to stop digging. No person or business wants be in the crosshairs of Ian Hislop! [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hislop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hislop

675 points by xbryanx 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Some context: "How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives" - 2024 | 331 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39010070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39010070 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=post%20office%20scandal&sort=byPopularity https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=uk%20post%20office&sort=byPopularity https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

bmacho 1y ago

https://archive.md/oldest/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/world/europe/uk-post-office-scandal-report.html https://archive.md/oldest/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10...

deleted 1y ago

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ignoramous 1y ago

Another post office operator, Seema Misra, was pregnant when she was sent to prison. She said in testimony that the local newspaper had published a photo of her and labeled her the "pregnant thief." While she was in prison, her husband was beaten up and subjected to racist insults, she testified. The tidal wave of fascist & far-right grievances are so hard to contain and fight against in the moment. Multi-cultural societies everywhere are never getting rid of it, are they?

bravesoul2 1y ago
At the moment yes but always has been in the UK.
Nasrudith 1y ago
Blaming the grievances on multiculturalism is yet another lie on the never-ending pile of lies that is fascism. If everyone was a literal clone from the same insular culture, fascism will invent new distinctions to create outgroups to oppress.
- tumsfestival 1y ago
  After race it's religion, when it's not religion it's politics, when it's not politics it's social class... It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if we will ever achieve anything like the Star Trek future where we just get past racism and bigotry. I have a feeling bigotry will be our great filter as a species.

XCabbage 1y ago

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deleted 1y ago
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throw_m239339 1y ago
It's the euphemism treadmill in action. It's like how "undocumented residents", which replaced "illegal aliens" in the media, now has a negative connotation anyway, so mainstream media are now trying to find a new word that doesn't sound "offensive"... but the very concept is loaded by definition, so no amount of euphemism is going to change that.
- anonymars 1y ago
  My take: as long as the thing being described connotes some lower status, change the term all you want and it will still be "uncomfortable" Negro, black, African American, person of color... it's not the term, it's the implication. Solve the fact that the treatment is that of second-class citizens and there won't be a need to create new terms. ("But that's hard and as an individual I feel powerless so instead I will use a different term I guess." Probably the same phenomenon causing people to direct energy against vaccines more than pollutants and chemicals) "Disabled", "handicapped", "differently-abled" -- we've never needed to rename "tall", have we?
kayodelycaon 1y ago
“Died by suicide” is not new. I heard it 30 years ago as a kid. Many, many professional organizations use clinical language around suicide because it’s always been a sensitive topic. You also see this everywhere in when people use euphemism instead of saying it directly.
- arp242 1y ago
  https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Died+by+suicide&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Died+by+suicid... Bloody woke libtards in Victorian era!

nextos 1y ago

I have followed this scandal quite closely over the years, and these two quotations sum it up. Pretty sad: "The report alleges that even before the program was rolled out in 1999, some Fujitsu employees knew that Horizon could produce false data." "As the years went by the complaints grew louder and more persistent [...] Still the Post Office trenchantly resisted the contention that on occasions Horizon produced false data."

tonyhart7 1y ago
the employee knew something going to fuck up but higher up maybe don't want to deal with clean up and proceed to release it asap hmm sounds like silicon valley work ethics
nlitened 1y ago
It would not surprise me if some developers at that time reported to journalists that they had a bug in their code, they'd go to jail for fabricating evidence, cybercrime, stealing of trade secrets, breaking an NDA, or something like that.
- hungmung 1y ago
  Why not all of the above?

mike_hearn 1y ago

To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details of what happened by making it sound like a natural disaster. Horizon is the case that should replace Therac-25 as a study in what can go wrong if software developers screw up. Therac-25 injured/killed six people, Horizon has ruined hundreds of lives and ended dozens. And the horrifying thing is, Horizon wasn't something anyone would have previously identified as safety-critical software. It was just an ordinary point-of-sale and accounting system. The suicides weren't directly caused by the software, but from an out of control justice and social system in which people blindly believed in public institutions that were actually engaged in a massive deep state cover-up. It is reasonable to blame the suicides on the legal and political system that allowed the Post Office to act in that way, and which put such low quality people in charge. Perhaps also on the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't. But this is HN, so from a software engineering perspective what can be learned? Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight. But most were bugs due to loss of transactionality or lack of proper auditing controls. Think message replays lacking proper idempotency, things like that. Transactions were logged that never really occurred, and when the cash was counted some appeared to be missing, so the Post Office accused the postmasters of stealing from the business. They hadn't done so, but this took place over decades, and decades ago people had more faith in institutions than they do now. And these post offices were often in small villages where the post office was the center of the community, so the false allegations against postmasters were devastating to their social and business lives. Put simply - check your transactions! And make sure developers can't rewrite databases in prod.

SirFatty 1y ago
"The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. " That's a really odd take.

Horffupolde 1y ago

Suicide is a verb and result by itself. Would the author also say “he died by murder”?

ellisv 1y ago
They are simplify avoiding using the word "committed" using a well accepted alternative because of the connotation with criminal behavior. But no they would say "died by homicide" not "died by murder".
- docdeek 1y ago
  Would they not say "was killed" and so allow "killed himself/herself"?
- Tostino 1y ago
  Maybe "were driven to suicide by..." to properly describe the situation?
cjs_ac 1y ago
This trend for commenting on news articles with nothing to say but a complaint about the wording of the headline is tedious. The right to free speech does not impose a responsibility to say something about everything you see.
- thoroughburro 1y ago
  Your argument is that the wording of headlines is so meaningless as to always be beneath comment? Seems silly.
- bendigedig 1y ago
  I think you're missing the point by a mile. The point isn't some tedious debate over grammar; it's about the choice of language that perpetuates the idea that suicide is a tragedy that happens passively 'to people' in some kind of tragic, medicalised, incomprehensible way which is severed from any socio-political context. In this case, these people were driven to suicide. I would argue that those responsible for the Horizon scandal are guilty of at minimum manslaughter of these poor people.

throw_m239339 1y ago

What a horrible story. What can you do when you know you are innocent but the court trusts the software more than it trusts people? And you are asked to repay something you never stole which off course leads to your financial ruin/divorce/... your kids bullied because you as a parent were deemed a thief... Imagine your spouse leaving you because of something you didn't even do... Someone absolutely needs to go to jail over this. This kind of software is supposed to go through a lengthy compliance and certification process, so clearly whatever person put their signature on that "certified" document is responsible for these death.

throw0101c 1y ago

The four-part mini-series Mr Bates vs The Post Office is worth checking out: > A faulty IT system called Horizon, developed by Fujitsu, creates apparent cash shortfalls that cause Post Office Limited to pursue prosecutions for fraud, theft and false accounting against a number of subpostmasters across the UK. In 2009, a group of these, led by Alan Bates, forms the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. The prosecutions and convictions are later ruled a miscarriage of justice at the conclusion of the Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd judicial case in 2019.[4][5] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office

ThisNameIsTaken 1y ago
What is particularly striking about the scandal is the impact of the mini-series. From what I understand (as a foreigner to the UK) is that it was the mini-series that sparked national interest in the case. Without it, those involved would still be in a bureaucratic and legal nightmare, in which all institutions rejected their innocence claims, and hardly anyone would have been held accountable. See also the "Impact" section on the linked wiki page. It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.
- duncans 1y ago
  It's worth pointing out that Mr Bates vs The Post Office screened in early 2024. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry was set up in 2020/2021 and the public hearings started in 2023. So it may have looked like "it was TV what done it" but the wheels of justice were turning long before the show came out.
  - penguin_booze 1y ago
    Wheels; justice: all these are just weasel words. Litigation is an exclusive privilege of the rich. And prison, of the poor(er).
  - worik 1y ago

lboc 1y ago

A good summary from the UK IT trade publication that broke the story: https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-Office-Horizon-scandal-explained-everything-you-need-to-know https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-Office-Horizon-s... Not sure if this requires sign-in/subscription, so apologies in advance. I did neither and have access to the full article.

comprev 1y ago
Paywall removed: https://archive.ph/OZeED https://archive.ph/OZeED

mrkramer 1y ago

I thought British legal system and computer forensics were serious but this case is just a travesty of justice.

closewith 1y ago
The British legal system is and always has been a litany of injustices dressed up in formal attire. To be avoided at all costs.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  That mess inspired the American legal system though, which is probably one of if not the best in the world. IMO common law is still better than case law at least.
  - closewith 1y ago
    > That mess inspired the American legal system though, which is probably one of if not the best in the world. Poe's Law strikes again. The American legal system isn't even the best legal system in the US.
    - nusaru 1y ago
      > in the US Huh? What does this mean? Are there other systems in the US that I’m not aware of?
      - closewith 1y ago
        Yes, the indigenous domestic nations.
        renewiltord 1y ago
        Indeed, and science can’t account for the wonders of indigenous ways of thinking either.

cedws 1y ago

The failing is as much with the court as it is with Fujitsu. Why did they blindly accept Horizon’s data as evidence? What if the computer said the Queen stole all the money and ran off to Barbados, would they have thrown her in jail? Why was the output of a black box, which may as well have been a notebook Fujitsu could have written anything they wanted into, treated as gospel?

rwmj 1y ago
The actual answer to this is terrible. Courts had to trust the computer was correct. There was a common law presumption that a computer was operating correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary (and getting that evidence is basically impossible for the individuals being charged who were post office workers, not computer experts, and the source code was a trade secret). This might change, partly in response to this case: https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/use-of-evidence-generated-by-software-in-criminal-proceedings/use-of-evidence-generated-by-software-in-criminal-proceedings-call-for-evidence https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/use-of-evid... Quite interesting article about this: https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/the-presumption-that-computers-are-reliable https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/the-presumption-t...
- imtringued 1y ago
  The emperor has no clothes. Oxford is the worlds AI Safety research hub and yet they didn't think about campaigning to overturn a law which negates their entire reason for existing?
  - PaulRobinson 1y ago
    This happened a long time before the current resurgence in AI.
    - silon42 1y ago
      Imagine how much will "machine is right and can't be changed" happen with AI.

RedShift1 1y ago

What was the actual bug in the software that caused the accounting errors?

renewiltord 1y ago
From the wording of the description of the programmer who failed to debug and labeled it user error it appears that it is fairly typical Accenture-grade software where there is no single bug so much as the program itself approximates the correct result. Their data model appears to have been akin to having a single accumulator sum up things rather than to use something like double-entry bookkeeping or an account graph so that the source of errors could be traced. It’s less “a bug” and more a coincidence that the application worked when it did.
- RedShift1 1y ago
  So the errors could be down to using floats instead of decimal types?
  - renewiltord 1y ago
    It could be that. It could be that they just have separate code paths for measuring "amount in" and "amount reported" with an if-clause missing in one and present in the other. From the description the debugging programmer provides, it doesn't look like they had any sort of coherent design.
wolfgang42 1y ago
The judge’s report[1] lists twenty-eight different classes of failure, including: - Confusing and buggy UI causing clerks to duplicate or mis-enter transactions - Inventory getting “stuck” in branches after the product was discontinued; the attempt to remove it hid the inventory but caused its value to reappear on the books again each accounting period - Failing touch screens entering spurious purchases overnight - Incomplete rollback of distributed transactions - Byzantine failures during hardware replacement causing multiple transactions to be assigned the same ID and overwrite each other - Fujitsu employees with unaudited write access to the production database making one-off modifications - The point of sale system simply telling the clerk to give too much change back to the customer There’s no “one bug” here; the main failure was that those responsible continued to dismiss any problems as users being either in error or outright malicious, despite massive amounts of evidence that the system had technical flaws. Better quality software would have reduced the problems, but no system is bug-free and in many cases very little effort was made to identify the root causes of problems, much less to prevent similar ones from happening again. [1] 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-...

asdefghyk 1y ago

I worked as a software test analysist (technical tester) for 20 years for a company that processed large amounts of money ( millions of gambling transactions) Our testing had to produce documented repeatable test cases and test evidence of correct software system operation. My company had to pay third party independent software auditors who would examine the software in the test results in ay way they wanted. This involved re running some of our tests and specific tests requested by the auditor. These audits could range from a few hours to several days depending on the software change. Auditors would prepare a report for the government department. If there was no repeatable test case and test evidence recorded than the software was regarded as not tested, Making the tests repeatable would sometimes involve in considerable test data setup. My point is the defense should have kept digging and ask for test evidence that software had been such tested. ( On busy days, the companies software could process $100m or more transactions with transaction speeds of 1000 or more a second, so such testing was important)

hyperman1 1y ago

I'd love to see a technical analysis of what went wrong with the software and what to do about it. Similar to when airplanes crash etc... This is another case like Therac-25 that should be tought in every IT master class.

rwmj 1y ago
I did read a very technical report about this which obviously now I can't find :-( My takeaways were: (1) They didn't bother with double-entry bookkeeping. (2) It was a distributed system which no one fully understood and was not based on any normal distributed system principles. (3) Developers made ad hoc changes to the code and even database to temporarily patch things up, even going so far as to hard-code database ids into special cases throughout the code. Edit: I think this one: 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-... Also related article: 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...

secondcoming 1y ago

The inquiry into this scandal was live streamed on Youtube. You had lawyers quizzing people from all ranks of the Post Office and Fujistu; very interesting. Ever since, I’ve worded my work related electronic communications with the supposition that a lawyer may read them at some point in the future. If I’m ever asked to do something seemingly unusual or ‘out of the box’, it must be put to me in writing.

parados 1y ago

Here is the original source for this article. Warning: it is a tough read, particularly section 3.c "Case Illustrations": https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2025-07/Post%20Office%20Horizon%20IT%20Inquiry%20Final%20Report%20Volume%201.pdf https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/fi...

throwawayHpCvfn 1y ago

As someone who attempted suicide almost ten years ago, I'm disheartened by how cold-hearted the comments on this article are. Accusations of certain wording being "woke" or "PC" and completely ignoring the substance of the article itself, as if the wording were the tragedy here. If we must have this discussion, I stopped using the phrase "committed suicide" when I found out it was a relic of when it was illegal and stigmatized by the justice system. I prefer "died by suicide", and I appreciate when others use it too. Not in the sense that I will correct people when they say committed (because most people, the ones in this comment section excepted, don't know the origins), but rather "oh hey, that person knows about this, and they care too."

whycome 1y ago
I think the discussion is that “driven to suicide” would be a more appropriate term. Their deaths were not coincidental or incidental. It is an attempt to acknowledge that their act was the result of the actions of the post office and others.
- throwawayHpCvfn 1y ago
  A few comments are like that, yes, and I have no objections to that description. Most of the discussion though seems to be more like this: > I guess some people take comfort in the idea that suicide is thrust on people and they take no responsibility for their actions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44531844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44531844
Mordisquitos 1y ago
[flagged]
- throwawayHpCvfn 1y ago
  Me: "Hey, I survived a suicide attempt several years ago, and I appreciate it when people who know the negative history behind 'committing suicide' say something else, because it shows that they care." You (pre-edit): "The problem many of us see with saying 'unalived by suicide' rather than 'committed suicide' is the artificiality of the sentence and the implication that the language we speak has to keep up with the correct newspeak due to the latest euphemistic moral cleansing lest we appear uncouth and uncultured." My point stands.

cletus 1y ago

People should go to jail for this. Anyone who has worked on a large migration eventually lands on a pattern that goes something like this: 1. Double-write to the old system and the new system. Nothing uses the new system; 2. Verify the output in the new system vs the old system with appropriate scripts. If there are issues, which there will be for awhile, go back to (1); 3. Start reading from the new system with a small group of users and then an increasingly large group. Still use the old system as the source of truth. Log whenever the output differs. Keep making changes until it always matches; 4. Once you're at 100% rollout you can start decomissioning the old system. This approach is incremental, verifiable and reversible. You need all of these things. If you engage in a massive rewrite in a silo for a year or two you're going to have a bad time. If you have no way of verifying your new system's output, you're going to have a bad time. In fact, people are going to die, as is the case here. If you're going to accuse someone of a criminal act, a system just saying it happened should NEVER be sufficient. It should be able to show its work. The person or people who are ultimately responsible for turning a fraud detection into a criminal complaint should themselves be criminally liable if they make a false complaint. We had a famous example of this with Hertz mistakenly reporting cars stolen, something they ultimately had to pay for in a lawsuit [1] but that's woefully insufficient. It is expensive, stressful and time-consuming to have to criminally defend yourself against a felony charge. People will often be forced to take a plea because absolutely everything is stacked in the prosecution's favor despite the theoretical presumption of innocence. As such, an erroneous or false criminal complaint by a company should itself be a criminal charge. In Hertz's case, a human should eyeball the alleged theft and look for records like "do we have the car?", "do we know where it is?" and "is there a record of them checking it in?" In the UK post office scandal, a detection of fraud from accounting records should be verified by comparison to the existing system in a transition period AND, moreso in the beginning, double checking results with forensic accountants (actual humans) before any criminal complaint is filed. [1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusation-stealing-cars-settlement https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...

akudha 1y ago

This was depressing to read. Failures at so many levels. 1. Immediately after Horizon was rolled out, issues were reported. But ignored 2. Prosecutors didn't bother to verify if there is another explanation before accusing thousands of people of stealing? Isn't it common sense to pause for a second and think, "could we please double check the evidence? how can thousands of postal workers suddenly turn into thieves?" 3. local newspaper had published a photo of her and labeled her the “pregnant thief.” - of course, UK tabloids. Click baits and write whatever the fuck they want, no matter whose lives are destroyed 4. post office has said that it does not have the means to provide redress for that many people - so they have the means to falsely prosecute and destroy the lives of thousands of people, but they don't have the means to correct their blunders? This happened more than a decade ago. Citizens are expected to do everything on time (pay taxes, renew drivers license...) or get fined/jailed, but the government can sit on their butt for 10 YEARS and do nothing about a blunder they caused? What about Fujitsu? Why can't the government make Fujitsu pay for the destruction caused by their shitty software? Jeez. This is just fucking nuts

dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
>Failures at so many levels. Describes pretty much the vast majority of people. All groups/institutions/enterprises made of such people will follow a similar path. Point being - there is no hope.
PaulRobinson 1y ago
I suggest you keep an eye on what's being published in Private Eye and Computer Weekly if you have access to those where you are. They're holding feet to the fire on all these points. One thing I would say is that if somebody is convicted in the UK, it's acceptable legally and culturally to call them by the crime they committed. The problem is that in this case the Post Office had unique legal powers, and was being run by people who did not want to "harm the brand" by admitting they had made mistakes, so kept digging. There is also a fundamental flaw in how the courts - and the Post Office prosecutors - were instructed to think about the evidence in common law. Bizarrely, it was not (and may still not), be an acceptable defense to say that computer records are wrong. They are assumed correct in UK courts. IT systems were legally considered infallible, and if your evidence contradicts an IT systems evidence, you were considered a liar by the court, and a jury might be instructed accordingly. Yes, that's awful. Yes, it's ruined lives. But also, I think all involved have realised pointing fingers at one or two individuals to blame hasn't really helped fix things. Like an air accident, you have to have several things go wrong and compound errors to get into this amount of trouble, normally. There were systemic failing across procurement, implementation, governance, investigations, prosecutions, within the justice system and beyond. I already know people who have worked for Fujitsu in the UK are not exactly shouting about it. And yet, they're still getting awarded contracts before the compensation has been paid out...

duncans 1y ago

What is amazing is the engineers the Fujitsu employed would testify in court against some of the subpostmasters saying "there were no faults" where in unearthed evidence of their support logs they could be clearly acknowledging bugs that could create false accounts, manually updating records and audit logs to balance it out (and also sometimes screwing that up). See Nick Wallis' coverage: * https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html * https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/ecce-chambers/ https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/ecce-chambers/ > [Anne] Chambers closed the ticket with a definitive: “No fault in product”. > The cause of the defect was assigned to “User” – that is, the Subpostmaster. > When Beer asked why, Chambers replied: “Because I was rather frustrated by not – by feeling that I couldn’t fully get to the bottom of it. But there was no evidence for it being a system error.” ... > Chambers conceded: “something was obviously wrong, in that the branch obviously were getting these discrepancies that they weren’t expecting, but all I could see on my side was that they were apparently declaring these differing amounts, and I certainly didn’t know of any system errors that would cause that to happen, or that would take what they were declaring and not record it correctly…. so I felt, on balance, there was just no evidence of a system error.” > No evidence. [Sir Wyn] Williams pointed out that it surely was unlikely to be a user error if both trainers and auditors had recorded the Subpostmaster as inputting information correctly. Chambers replied: > “Well, yeah, I… yes, I don’t know why… I’m not happy with this one. But I still stand by there being no indication of a system error and the numbers that they were recording just didn’t make a lot of sense.”

justin66 1y ago
Pretty sure I can guess the answer, but: does the UK have professional licensure for "software engineers?"
- petesergeant 1y ago
  Yes, software engineers can become Chartered Engineers via the BCS: https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/get-registered/chartered-engineer-ceng/ https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/get-registe... Has anyone, ever? I've met precisely one.

SCdF 1y ago

Effectively tortured to death. One of the things that frustrates me with how ethics is taught in computer science is that we use examples like Therac 25, and people listen in horror, then their takeaway is frequently "well thank god I don't work on medical equipment". The fact that it's medical equipment is a distraction. All software can cause harm to others. All of it. You need to care about all of it.

whycome 1y ago
That’s why the “died by suicide” language can be problematic. These people were driven by several factors and they were left with no choice.
- arrowsmith 1y ago
  "Driven to suicide" may be more accurate. And damning.
jedimastert 1y ago
Jesus I desperately wish real ethics classes were required for computer science degrees
- lmm 1y ago
  The best available evidence is that ethics classes reduce ethical behaviour.
  - jedimastert 1y ago
    I'm going to need a source on that
- UK-AL 1y ago
  In the UK they are I think? Well if they want to be BCS accredited.
- izacus 1y ago
  Ethic classes are pointless without ethical liability and accountability of people causing suffering. Yes, even the Jira javascript ticket punchers hould be accountable for what they do.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44499498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44499498

jekwoooooe 1y ago

[flagged]

exiguus 1y ago

I became aware of this fraud involving Fujitsu/Horizon and the UK Post Office at the beginning of this year because I watched the movie 'Mr. Bates vs The Post Office.' I can recommend it. It's sad to see all these people losing their livelihoods and beliefs. And it gives me hope to see how they fought back and started to help each other over the decades.

jordanb 1y ago

I went on a deep dive on this scandal about a year or so ago. One thing that struck me is the class element. Basically, the Post Office leadership could not understand why someone would buy a PO franchise. It's a substantial amount of money up front, and people aren't allowed to buy multiple franchises, so every PO was an owner/operator position. Essentially people were "buying a job". The people in leadership couldn't understand why someone would buy the opportunity to work long hours at a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary at the end of the year. They assumed that there must be a real reason why people were signing up and the real reason was to put their hands in the till. So they ended up assuming the postmasters were stealing, and the purpose of the accounting software was to detect the fraud so it could be prosecuted. When the accounting software started finding vast amounts of missing funds, they ignored questions about the software because it was working as intended. I bet if the opposite had happened, and it found very little fraud, they would have become suspicious of the software because their priors were that the postmasters were a bunch of thieves.

imtringued 1y ago
This is utterly illogical. Who in their right mind would commit a crime with a 100% probability of getting caught? This isn't a classic embezzlement of public funds, where the people receiving the money are also the people deciding whether it was well spent or not and hence could easily divert some of the money through behind the scenes deals with contractors without getting caught. The "embezzlement" here is on the level of getting an invoice and not paying it.
hnfong 1y ago
Fascinating. Do you have references for the motives/biases of the PO leadership?
- jordanb 1y ago
  My entry-point was listening to this podcast, it's pretty long but it goes into the fact that the purpose of horizon was to detect fraud and reduce shrinkage, that the leadership and their consultants were coming up with outsized estimates for the amount of fraud and using that as financial justification for the project. They also talk about postmaster's motivations for buying a franchise and how sitting behind a retail desk in a small town with a modest but steady income is actually one of the best outcomes available to the type of working-class Briton who was buying the franchise. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j

cman82 1y ago

For an excellent in-depth look at the scandal, I recommend Nick Wallis's book The Great Post Office Scandal. I read this soon after it came out and was wondering why it hadn't caused a national uproar. It was only the miniseries that prompted the required outrage.

rossant 1y ago
Yes, many scandals stay under the radar until a good book, film or series reaches millions at once. I hope the same happens with another subject close to my heart [1, 2]. A Netflix film on a related topic a few years ago already had a huge impact [3]. It focused on one case, but by the end of the movie it is clear that many others are similarly affected. [1] https://cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-shaken-baby-syndrome-abusive-head-trauma-controversy/ https://cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-shaken-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Care_of_Maya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Care_of_Maya

nickelpro 1y ago

The bug is hardly the problem here, it is necessary but far from sufficient for something like this to happen. The UK legal system's ability to prosecute and penalize people without anything more than circumstantial evidence makes it unfit for purpose. It should be an embarrassment to a country that considers itself a member of the developed Western world.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
>The UK legal system's ability to prosecute and penalize people without anything more than circumstantial evidence makes it unfit for purpose. This defect is present in all justice systems to some degree or another. For that matter, most crimes (serious or otherwise) rarely have the sort of smoking gun evidence that would satisfy us all that it wasn't circumstantial. Worse still, when the evidence isn't circumstantial, it's still usually testimonial in nature... some witness is on the stand at trial, describing what they saw. Or, perhaps more accurately, misinterpreting what they saw/remember. The only difference this time around is that they were misinterpreting what their software logic meant.
- nickelpro 1y ago
  I recommend you read the report. The charges were brought solely on the claimed accounting shortfalls with no further evidence that the postmasters and sub-postmasters did anything wrong, not even an attempt to discover where the money had gone or anything resembling forensic accounting that would be required in similar US cases. In the most shocking case, with Martin Griffiths, there were attempts to hold him responsible for robbery loses he had absolutely nothing to do with: > On 2 May 2013 a robbery occurred at the Post Office which resulted in a net loss to the Post Office of £38,504.96, which was reduced to £15,845 after some of the money was recovered. Mr Griffiths was injured during the robbery; he was present in the branch when it occurred. The Post Office Investigator advised the Post Office that Mr Griffiths was partly to blame for the loss sustained by the Post Office and that he should be held responsible for part of the loss. [1] Such a claim wouldn't even be colorable in most jurisdictions. I disagree that anything similar could happen at this scale in the US or France. Individual cases might not be handled perfectly, but this is a systemic miscarriage of justice where at every turn individuals were prosecuted without any evidence of individual wrongdoing. It was believed money was missing, no attempt was made to discover how it went missing, and the post-masters were held responsible without further inquiry. The legal system upheld these non-findings as facts and convicted people based upon them. [1]: Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, 3.49

kypro 1y ago

I know this is only tangentially relevant, but as someone who lives in the UK the inhuman and process driven nature of the way the state operates today is terrifying to me. Several times in recent years I've had people significantly financially and emotionally affected by what amounts to just fairly minor errors of judgement that the state treats as deliberate criminal acts and will follow up on with absolutely no human judgement or compassion. An obvious example of this is tax law which despite being extremely complicated is followed by the state with no human consideration for individual circumstances. I guess upper-middle-class people must just know from osmosis every letter of UK tax code, but I've had so many people in my family not realise that they need to fill tax returns for certain things like Bitcoin disposals, OnlyFans earnings, eBay gains, income from helping neighbours with building/gardening work, etc... And the state can be absolutely fucking brutal when you make a mishap like this. They do not give a crap about intention or whether you've otherwise been a law abiding citizen. Case in point is HMRCs name and shame list which I believe was intended to name and shame high-profile tax evaders, but has basically just become a list of working class dudes who (perhaps stupidly in our eyes) didn't realise they had to manually file tax returns on their income. Even extremely mediocre things are treated with brutal enforcement... For example, a street by mine recently changed from 30mph to 20mph overnight and this resulted in literally thousands of people being caught exceeding the speed limit by 10mph. There was no understanding that these people obviously didn't expect the speed limit to randomly change over night, instead they were all sent a letter from the government stating the government's intent to prosecute them for their offence... Any human would have thought, hm, yeah the fact thousands of people were caught when we made this change might imply that people didn't deliberately exceed the speed limit but we didn't make it clear enough that it had changed. Obviously this is a totally different magnitude to what these people went through, but again I think it's all a result of overly systematic rule following that makes people feel completely powerless when the state decides they've done something wrong. There's absolutely nothing you can do to say, "hey, you know me... I wouldn't do this. You've made a mistake." Nope, sorry computer says no, and that's the end of it. I get what I'm suggesting here isn't practical and this is just a side-effect of a large state which must depersonalise and systematise everything, but when you're a person caught on the wrong side of that system it's fucking scary because no one will listen to you or relate to you as a human being. And everyone you talk to can ruin your life at the click of a button and you know it's their job to do it when the system tells them that's what they must do. Obviously these people had some legal assumption of innocence, but on a human level the assumption was always that they couldn't be trusted and were criminals. If you've ever experienced this before, where it's just assumed that you are guilty because of some faulty or misleading information it's psychologically brutal. You feel helpless, powerless and you're treated as if you lack humanity. It's horrible feeling and completely unsurprising to me these people decided to do the only thing they could reasonably do to take back control of their lives. Sadly we'll learn nothing from this.

lysace 1y ago

I was curious so I looked into it: It looks like about 10x the average UK suicide rate (assuming "the worst case": all male, 40+ over about a decade. In reality some percentage of the about 1000 wrongfully accused will be female, of course).

foota 1y ago

This is horrifying.

arresin 1y ago

There is something very rotten about this country. It’s like the heart of it has rotted out totally.

horizion2025 1y ago

A big issue is that the British post office could itself act as the prosecutor. Other entities reporting a crime need to convince the public prosecutor before there even is a case, but due to hundred years old traditions the Post Office had the right act as its own prosecutor. Effectively the same problem as in the LLoyd's scandal where LLoyd's effectively was its own regulator.

phendrenad2 1y ago

We've chased all of the smart people out of government. You're more likely to find a smart person working as a cook the local fried chicken restaurant than you are to find one in government. It has to be said. And you'll all find that it's true if you pay attention. Those of you who have been paying attention already noticed this.

Nifty3929 1y ago

What boggles my mind is that so many of us still thing more government is the way to address problems. The fact is, humans are human, and work in both government and in business. But a business cannot put you in jail or unilaterally freeze all your money. A business can accuse you of a crime, but they will be very careful before they do as the consequences of bring wrong are very severe - for a business. Corporations can fire you or sell your data or send you targeted adds. But the risks associated with government are far worse.

monksy 1y ago

Don't forget her name: Paula Vennells (Royal Mail CEO). She went on record to state there was no issue despite reports. I'm sure we're see justice for her actions. /s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells Remember her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPYo_gq329w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPYo_gq329w

tjpnz 1y ago
I haven't. She's yet to face any real consequences too. Thoroughly despicable.
dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
She alone is not to blame, she's doing what a psychopath is expected to do. Blame people who gave her that power and did not monitor her abuse of the power she had.
martin-t 1y ago
Lying should be punishable according to max(expected harm, indended harm, actual harm). Making factual statements from a position of power without making sure they are correct is lying.
game_the0ry 1y ago
Wow, that video was hard to watch. She needs to go to jail yesterday.

patrickdavey 1y ago

I think that "Mr Bates vs the post office" (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27867155/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27867155/) should be required watching for software developers. It was an internal developer bearing witness that made a material difference here. If you're the developer logging in to fix errors and the postmaster scandal is in full swing, then it's time to look at being a whistleblower. If you're the developer writing code to hack emissions tests in cars, again, look at your ethics.

ta555555 1y ago

I don't understand why people kill the victim rather than the person who made them a victim, especially when they are the victim. These people know that are being wronged. These people know the wrongdoing is life-destroying...

lesser-shadow 1y ago

U.K gov try not to be hilariously evil challenge:impossible. But honestly I'm not even slightly surprised as this is coming from the same "people" who invented the window tax.

rmk 1y ago

This is why there should be tort law in England and other common law locales.

hermitcrab 1y ago

This is a disgraceful story from start to finish. Many of the postmasters have still not been compensated and no-one in the post office or Fujitsu has been properly held to account yet, all these years later. In fact most of them have retired on big pensions. Paula Vennels was nearly parachuted in as a Bishop. The UK tax payer is footing the compensation bill. And Fujitsu continue to get fat contracts from the British Government. Kudos to Alan Bates, Private Eye, Computer Weekly and a few others who fought many years to get this far. But justice has still not been done.

hermitcrab 1y ago

This whole scandal has been exposed partly due to the dogged work of journalists at Private Eye over many years. Private Eye is also very funny, with some very good cartoons. Please consider taking out a subscription to Private Eye, to support investigative journalism - even if you only read the cartoons.

comprev 1y ago
Private Eye might be humorous but they're also very respected for their journalistic integrity. They will expose scandals and wrongdoing which many publications would buckle under pressure to stop digging. No person or business wants be in the crosshairs of Ian Hislop! [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hislop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hislop