Fujitsu sorry for Post Office horror – but still cashing big UK govt checks Fujitsu has been awarded around £510 million ($682 million) in UK public sector contracts since a TV dramatization of the Horizon Post Office scandal – including a recent £220 million ($294 million) deal with the UK tax collector, awarded without competition. Since the dramatization was broadcast, Fujitsu CEO Takahito Tokita, …
Spelling is a conspiracy to sell dictionaries and the most authentic English is spoken in the US mid-west and Newfoundland.
If someone is too stupid to understand that the US spelling of check is the same word as the UK spelling of cheque and that the differences are entirely cosmetic how the hell did they land a job in tech?
Fujitsu killed people, imprisoned others, refuses to pay compensation and we continue to shovel cash at them them (half a billion dollarpounds so far and counting) and you are worried about spelling?? Are you in the 3rd grade? Have we imported spelling bees? This is not an important issue, full stop.
On the western side of the pond someone appears to have had a sense of humour bypass, and takes themselves extremely seriously. Better check it out before damage is done.
Fujitsu, of course, are culpable, right alongside eggregiously cowardly Post Office executives.
No point sending anyone to prison—wasting taxpayer's money. Much simpler to confiscate their unearned pensions, along with golden parachutes and any other remuneration relevant to their incompetence. On the basis of collective responsibility.
Back in the day if a Lloyds Name's investment went south they could literally lose their shirt—be rendered destitute to pay what they owed. Today that is considered a little harsh, but maybe something in that direction would help focus minds, and give the word 'responsible' some actual meaning, and teeth.
There, if that is serious enough for you write me a cheque. It'll probably be more than most of the victims of the whole disgraceful shambles are getting.
Agree re: prison. For non-violent crime, it is largely counter-productive. Get the offenders doing something useful, but still paying for their own keep. Locking people up is extremely expensive and makes it harder for the offenders to find employment when released, adding even more to the bill to be footed by the exchequer. I certainly don't advocate an easy ride, there are plenty of tough, unpleasant jobs out there, just waiting for the likes of Vennells.
Just to be absolutely clear:
Fujitsu did not kill anyone.
Fujitsu did not imprison anyone.
Fujitsu has not refused to pay compensation.
Let me be clear — I am by no means a defender of Fujitsu. Like most people, I find their role in this entire scandal to be deeply troubling, and I believe their actions warrant serious scrutiny and accountability. But we must not allow the facts to be distorted, even in our outrage.
Fujitsu does not have the legal authority to imprison anyone — that is the domain of the courts. Individuals were wrongly prosecuted and convicted based on evidence supplied by Fujitsu, but that is not the same as Fujitsu directly imprisoning them.
As for compensation, Fujitsu has not refused to pay; rather, they have not yet been legally compelled to do so — a distinction that matters. Personally, I believe they should be held liable and made to contribute meaningfully to the redress of this injustice, but at present, they are not in breach of any such legal order.
And finally, the claim that Fujitsu “killed people” is not only false, it is potentially libellous. There is no evidence that Fujitsu has caused anyone’s death in a way that would meet legal or journalistic standards for such a claim.
If we want accountability, it must be grounded in fact. Hyperbole may feel cathartic, but it undermines serious efforts toward justice.
If I was you ChoHag I'd get myself a decent lawyer, just in case Fujitsu's legal team are avid The Register readers and fancy a field day out!!
But that's not the same as stating Fujitus killed people now is it Sherrie? And, for the avoidance of doubt, there is no actual evidence that would stand up in a court of law which unequivocally states that their suicide is as a direct result of Fujitsu's actions.
Like I said - you need to get some perspective, this is like talking to toddlers!!
Whenever so much money is dutifully being paid to Fujitsu by the current government, what is the excuse for the dire straits state of contested compensation not being paid to the previously wronged postmasters/postmistresses?
Are they wanting and waiting for claimants to die off? It certainly looks like it. A bloody national executive disgrace.
Imagine the precedent they’d set. If subpostmasters receive full compensation, what’s next? Small business forced to shut down under IR35 - not for breaking rules, but because successive governments sold the market to corporate lobbyists? If justice becomes contagious, half the country might queue for redress. Easier to stall, deflect, and let time do the dirty work.
People downvoting this probably still swallow the official line - that small, worker-owned businesses were some sort of tax dodge, while corporate consultancies doing the exact same thing (just with better PR, worse morals and actual tax avoidance structures in place) are beacons of legitimacy - and conveniently exempt from IR35.
We were gaslit into believing having loyal clients made you a fraud, unless you were a big consultancy - then it’s “trusted delivery partner.”
Under IR35, thousands of businesses weren’t punished for wrongdoing - they were wiped out for being too efficient, too trusted, and too independent. The message was clear: shut down your corner shop, stop competing with the big boys, and go work the till they own. Upskilling? Initiative? Long-term client relationships? All liabilities now.
And no one blinked. If postmasters deserve compensation for being crushed by a broken system, so do the thousands of small business owners who were quietly banned from growing, investing, or even existing - not for any crime, but for daring to compete. Talent, initiative, years of skill-building - all declared illegitimate overnight. The corner shop that might have become the next Tesco was told to shut up, shut down, and take a zero-hours contract at the consultancy that lobbied to erase it.
The downvotes are more likely because the two situations aren't remotely comparable. This is a situation where everyone involved at a senior level knew the software was faulty (though a certain person allegedly asked not to be told everything so that they could maintain 'plausible deniability'), they repeatedly lied to the postmasters who were reporting faults and unexplained cash losses (e.g. investigators would say "no-one else has reported this" when they themselves had dealt with the same matter many times elsewhere) and some people lied in court. It was an co-ordinated strategy over many years to stop bad publicity and expense for Fujitsu, PO head honchos, and government ministers who were supposed to have oversight. And people died as a direct result, whether suicide or stress-related health problems. Once it finally blew up in their faces, those same people wrung their hands and said "very sorry", and yet the government are STILL dragging out the compensation payments and Fujitsu, who created the software and therefore the problem, have paid the square root of £f/all. I.e. they've effectively all got away with it.
The only real 'punishment' was St Paula lost her Damehood. Oh noes, how terrible, sad face ... She (and others) should be looking out of prison bars right now.
The Post Office scandal was monstrous - but at least now it’s universally recognised as such. With IR35, we’re still inside the lie.
Small, legitimate businesses were branded tax dodgers - not because they did anything wrong, but because they threatened the cosy monopoly of government-favoured consultancies. Ministers still pretend it’s about fairness, while their departments quietly funnel billions to firms exempt from the very rules used to crush smaller rivals.
This is the greater scandal - because it’s systemic, ongoing, and cloaked in respectability. It didn’t just ruin lives. It erased opportunity. It told skilled, self-reliant people they no longer had the right to run their own business - and did so with the full force of the state, wrapped in the language of “reform”.
And where were the watchdogs? CMA? Silent. SFO? Missing. NCA? Still fumbling inside the paper bag. The judiciary? Lost in procedural tangles, never once pausing to ask: “Doesn’t this stink?”
There are no statistics for the human cost - no tally of crushed ambition, lost savings, breakdowns, or suicides buried in anonymous data. But when you strip people of the right to build something of their own, you don’t just damage the economy. You kill hope.
And unlike Horizon, this wasn’t hidden. It was done in plain sight.
"Are they wanting and waiting for claimants to die off?"
It's the standard British government approach. MPs see it, and don't give a shit. See the concurrent scandal over infected blood, where the bunglers of government are failing in the simple act of paying out money to people they've harmed. And mesothelioma (asbestos) compensation which is going the same way. Meanwhile the fuckwits are trying to hand out compensation to non-UK citizens for example who were harmed by the New Orleans attacks on 1 Jan 2025 amongst other things*, we've got all the Afghan resettlement screw up that'll result in payments of billions.
Seems the job of our government is to hand out money to anybody, but to do it badly, at high cost to the tax payer but with limited benefit to UK citizens, and without any thought for what is fair, or in the national interest.
* https://www.gov.uk/government/news/compensation-new-orleans-terror-attack
HMRC now claims it had to hand Fujitsu £220 million without competition - because their systems are “too entangled.” That’s not procurement - that’s a hostage situation.
But the real scandal isn’t just that this happened. It’s that no one is held to account for creating such a farce in the first place. No investigation into the decisions that led to this dependency. No consequences for locking public infrastructure into private hands. Just the usual routine: bury the blame, shrug theatrically, and open the public purse a little wider.
Imagine the bodies meant to prevent this - happily taking taxpayer money, then going back to sleep.
All of this could be solved by the civil service having the skills to specify or vet design in-house so they wouldn't be fleeced time and time again. Any outside contractor they brought in would either be following the government's in-house design or wouldn't be able to propose a design which locked government into something as the government would have the skills to see it for what it was.
"Used to also do old fashioned DataCentre Hosting too - Sovereign Cloud if you will."
It is interesting to note that at least one of Fujitsu's Data Centres in Belfast (that apparently still host Horizon) used to be a NI Government Data Centre back in the 1980/90s until the government organisation operating it was privatised (management buyout AFAIK) to create CFM, which ICL later bought and then Fujitsu bought ICL.
https://ceoni.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/noel-brady-respecting-your-customer-is-at-the-heart-of-doing-business/
Please provide evidence that people were forced into Disguised remuneration schemes. People were told that it was possible to avoid tax. I was a contractor and would have been highly suspicious of any scheme that promised tax-free income. The controversy is that the legislation is retrospective.
https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/The-Loan-Charge-scandal-explained-Everything-you-need-to-know
Unfortunately there are only so many outsourcing companies to choose from, and most of them from grim experience, are crap.
Stating the obvious, Crapita followed by Serco / ASOS / Accenture / Capgemini etc etc.
In my own field, I wince every time a contract is given out to one of the big players. I can guarantee that the contract will be gibberish, the contractor will have better lawyers than the client and that the contractor will use the cheapest possible resource.
A true story:
A certain large pharma company used a major process plant contractor for many years. Eventually they got tired of the shoddy work, late delivery and cost over-runs. And so they terminated the contract with Contractor #1 and went across town to equally large Contractor #2. Who of course said that they could provide a better service.
Contractor #1 then terminated all their contract engineers as they had lost the big client. However, Contractor #2 needed to recruit a large number of contract engineers to work on the jobs for their new client.
The client got the same bunch of engineers wearing different jackets.
The moral of the story is that there are only so many competent people available at any one time and the codecil being that when dining with any large contractor one should use a very long spoon.
Exactly. This is also the effect of IR35 that was engineered to wipe out competition from small businesses - to ensure they couldn't grow, compete, or threaten the cosy cartel of consultancy giants.
Now it’s a rigged carousel: same useless engineers in different lanyards, lowest bidder wins, quality be damned. Upskilling? Why bother. You’re not hired for talent - you’re hired for being cheap and compliant. It’s asset stripping, plain and simple - of the workforce, the clients, and the taxpayer. And it’s all enabled by a corrupt state that sold out IT sector long ago.
That carousel seems okay, as long as the contract gets iteratively better with each cycle.
The same engineers under an improved set of guidelines and quality requirements.
The problem isn't so much the engineers as the legal/contracts/management that allows them to turn out crap.
A single crap engineer can get sacked or replaced. A crap culture drags them all down.
..... one can quite rightly expect its avid leading supporters and Westminster type Parliamentary administrators to be targets for increasingly popular collective rogue renegade action and personal attack.
Such is perfectly natural and unavoidably inevitable no matter what else one might imagine and/or think be a more likely result. The fact that such seems not to be gravely regarded and avoided at all and any cost just confirms to more than just a chosen few how monumentally stupid perversely corrupt politically inept parties and their supporting entities be, and how unsuited they be to be in any position of influence and lead.
Increasing civil disobedience and nowadays novel effective remote virtual resistance for emergences of practical rebellion are something of an unknown unknown to look out for and forward to because of the persistence of the abomination. Vive la révolution.
You could also try joing polticial parties and street protests. Not everything needs to involve electronics. ....fg_swe
To be surprisingly effective is everyone nowadays involving everything electronically, fg_swe, and that has humanity rendered catastrophically vulnerable and serially disadvantaged ...... and at a distinct loss with a lack of knowledge at how and against what and/or whom to engage with or attack ....... as are their usual pedantic modes of communication.
I never want any of the Post Office employees or the Fujitsu / ICL people involved in this project at my company. They should all burn in hell and should never work in IT or a position of trust again.
Some were obviously complicit and / or negligent, many should have seen the signs and spoken up. They were either incompetent or chose not to speak up. They have blood on their hands and have ruined countless lives.
