Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered Post Office chief exec Nick Read left British politicians shocked with his evidence before a Parliamentary committee yesterday after he admitted he could not say when the public body at the center of the historic miscarriage of justice knew when its system was at fault. A key element of the scandal – in which 736 managers of …
Read has been CEO for over 4 years, after the issue became public knowledge. Maybe not his mess, but as CEO he should been digging in to it and ready with answers.
I'm slightly confused by the difference between the Parliamentary Committee and the Statutory Inquiry. A summary of the evidence for the Inquiry should be good enough for the Committee.
(A cynic might say a Parliamentary Committee is for the government to be Seen To Be Doing Something, and a Statutory Inquiry is to bury the issue [As per "Yes, Minister"]).
I'm also uncomfortable with the Government rushing through special laws to address this. Why not just pardon everyone, have the Post Office repay all fines/clawbacks etc. and bring new prosecutions if appropriate. Not got the evidence to prosecute any more? Tough!
>>have the Post Office repay all fines/clawbacks etc.
A laudible thought however, you will have read in the article the comment from the committee spokesperson "You've told us that you haven't kept evidence safe about what money was paid to you inappropriately and therefore is owed back"
So the PO can't pay the money back because they haven't kept records of who they extorted it from. You couldn't make this farce up if you tried.
There are two problems, firstly each postmaster / mistress should know what they were required to pay to the Post Office to cover discrepancies in the Horizon accounts, but that hardly compensates for the loss of livelihood, home, reputation, or the psychological stresses of the above on them and their friends and family. Secondly, there will ahi been many occasions when there was a small discrepancy of a few pounds which the postmaster did not consider worth querying and paid, which could ahi been due to Horizon, but could also have been due to accidentally dropping a few coins or genuine mistakes by them, for which Horizon was not to blame.
The initial compensation should be a simple - show evidence you were fingered by the PO and get £2M which may be increased later but won’t be clawed back.
Why £2m? It could buy a pension of up to £100k Pa. But more likely some would be used to clear accumulated debts etc. plus at this level the receipt to will be able to pay for their own care costs, removing the need for further payments via the social care system.
And yes with potentially circa 3000 former postmasters fingered, that is a lot of money., but not an unreasonable amount of money per post master.
All that's actually required of Parliament for the criminal side is to declare that all private prosecutions for fraud, theft or false accounting by the Post Office potentially involving Horizon between certain dates are unsafe, and hereby quashed. This could have been done years ago, of course - it's probably within the competency of the DPP, given the evidence.
There is precedent for this, although the victims have usually been long dead by the time Parliament acts.
There is also a civil side though. A lot of subpostmasters were extorted by the Post Office - paying thousands that Horizon claimed was missing - but never actually convicted.
And of course the Post Office doesn't have records. Horizon is incapable of tracking money!
Not if the legislation enacted specifically mentions Post Office and Horizon only, there would be no problem with a specific act. My thoughts go to acts of parliament necessary to enlarge Felixstowe Port which did not permit all ports to expand the size of their sites.
Broad brush legislation should not be encouraged for interference in the judiciary.
"I'm slightly confused by the difference between the Parliamentary Committee and the Statutory Inquiry. A summary of the evidence for the Inquiry should be good enough for the Committee...
I believe one difference between a Statutory Inquiry and a Parliamentary Committee is that witnesses take an oath for the former once they take the stand, swearing that their evidence will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Thus if they lie they are committing the crime of perjury. The same does not apply for a hearing in front of a Parliamentary Committee and people are able to lie profusely without fear of prosecution. I believe it is correct to say that evidence exists proving Paula Vennells and her sidekick did that at a former hearing but apart from being judged in terms of character and reputation they will not incur criminal charges.
Nick Read is an utter disgrace and his public appearances continue to be widely lambasted on social media as shameful and appalling. The only thing he has said so far at any of these hearings where there is no doubt that he is telling the whole truth is that he is very well paid. Obscenely so, in fact. £800K per year of taxpayers money. One has to question the recruitment process behind appointing such an individual and the justification for such a huge burden on the public purse.
> I'm also uncomfortable with the Government rushing through special laws to address this. Why not just pardon everyone, have the Post Office repay all fines/clawbacks etc. and bring new prosecutions if appropriate. Not got the evidence to prosecute any more? Tough!
Apparently because they were legal prosecutions, the pardons/clearing names, has to be done through legal channels. Parliament cannot override judicial decisions, quite rightly, so has to enact a law in parliament to allow them to do that. But that is a very dodgy thing to give a government; the rights to override the judiciary is not something that should stay on the statute books and must be repealed once this one task is over.
I'm also uncomfortable with the Government rushing through special laws to address this.
Me too - it does seem to set an "interesting" precedent.
Why not just pardon everyone
That's not within the powers of Parliament - c.f. separation of court and legislature.
I've been pondering this a bit, and I'm surprised no senior judge has taken it up. All sides now agree that in almost all of the cases, the original conviction was unsound - so why don't all 600 or 700+ who haven't already had their convictions overturned jointly appeal, the evidence that Horizon was "flawed" is well known, the PO won't contend the appeal, and then the judge can think long enough to read the list of names and announce that the appeal is upheld. Technically I it needs a barrister to plead the appellants' case, but that shouldn't need much time given it's a mere formality - and the judge could award costs anyway. It sounds too simple so presumably I've missed something here :-(
That would make sense.
But think how quickly you could get through them if you really wanted to :
Appellant: I was convicted using false testimony and false evidence as has been proved in case blah. I rest my case.
Defendant: We concur.
Judge: Appeal granted.
Couple of days to get through them all ?
Not going to happen though.
There are very significant questions remaining unanswered.
- What 'help' did Fujitsu provide to the Post Office in regard to the prosecution of sub-postmasters? If they acted as experts in court (as it seems reasonable they might) then their duty is to the court, not to the Post Office. If they gave evidence that the Horizon system was secure when in fact it was not and they KNEW it was not, that could be extremely serious indeed.
- When, exactly, did the Post Office become aware that the Horizon system could not be relied upon? If prosecutions were brought after that and those prosecutions relied in a significant way on Horizon it's not much of a stretch to consider them to be malicious.
- Did anyone benefit financially from the errors in Horizon or the unauthorized activities of Fujitsu employees accessing terminals remotely?
- If so, who and where has the money gone?
- Horizon remains in use. Has it been subjected to a full, external forensic audit to confirm it's now secure and fit for purpose?
- Who did that audit and why hasn't it been published?
I suspect that fujitsu became aware of the errors quite quickly as their admins/helplines were correcting errors in horizons quite early on in its deployment.
However, they decided not to tell the PO because that could impact the income from the PO contract(thus affecting their own bonuses)
The PO (in all good faith at this point) used horizons data to prosecute the postmasters.
Now it gets even murkier
The PO becomes aware of the errors in horizons data(either through fujitsu admitting it or 3rd party(s) informing them), it has 2 choices here, admit it, and admit the previous convictions are unsafe. or keep it quiet and carry on.
Both companies were more interested in 'saving face' and 'costs of admiting failures' than they were in making sure the system worked as planned.
All this reminds me of the Challenger disaster when 'pressure to launch' and 'costs the the company' overrode the engineer's desire not to launch when freezing cold.
A good point made the other day by a reporter was that the behaviour of postmasters apparently changed but where was the money?
Suddenly sub postmasters started making losses and "required" more prosecutions. At the point of the prosecution no one explained where the money had gone. As Nick Ferrari said "where are all the flash cars and fur coats?"
Surely the post office & Fujitsu should have noticed these changes. When you change systems you check that the figures match or investigate why they don't.
I think this is key. They changed ONE thing and suddenly all these post offices had accounting errors. Either the postmasters had been at it for years and just been very good at hiding it (what % of postmasters were fiddling the numbers before horizon) OR the change in accounting system was causing the errors.
If they were already fiddling the system and hiding it they would likely find a way around it or stop doing it if the system couldn't be fooled. They would not keep on doing it once it had been noticed.
I have no actual information, but based on many years experience in IT I am sure it went something like...
In ICL... "We really shouldn't let the system go live. It is full of crap, with a list of priority 1 bugs as long as my arm. At least let us fix the problems with the audit trails..."
"No! It is going live on Tuesday!! If we don't, we can't recognise the revenue in this quarter. You just need to handhold the branches until we can get the Phase 2 release out there - when they phone up to complain the system is wrong, make a quick fix to the balance and get straight on to the next call."
In the Post Office... "Wow, this new Horizon system is great! It is showing us what we always suspected: there are loads of mistakes, and probably also fraud, in post offices every day! At last this new system can let us work out where the problems are, and maybe even catch some crooks. Take a look at that discrepancies report and pick a branch and do an audit to find out what is wrong".
I guess the thing I struggle with all of this is that, on every major project involving money I've worked on in the same timeframe, there has been:
- A list of issues/bugs encountered during testing (unit, functional, and UAT).
- That list is reviewed, and multiple meetings with ALL parties is held to decide which ones are critical and MUST be fixed.
- Testing.
- Review.
- Testing.
- Review. (as many times as it takes until all are happy)
- On the money side, do things stack up? On the old system it was £xxxx. On the new system, is it also £xxxx?
- If all seems well, roll it out, and WATCH IT LIKE A HAWK!
- Do an audit when something comes up (as you state).
so how was something like this missed?
Besides, what postmaster would use such a system, knowing it does checks, and THEN continue on to try and commit fraud? Ironic, as it turns out the system is the thing committing fraud, and not the postmaster....
Not that I'm siding with Fujitsu or the PO here - I know enough about the Horizon scandal to know that they are the ones at fault - but criminals tend to get caught because they're not as clever as they think they are. Fraudsters and embezzlers in particular often get caught because they don't know when to stop. So it's not as stupid as you'd imagine for the PO to think that a postmaster might be thinking "they may have these checks but they won't catch me".
Which project did we both work on?
Totally agree with Graham and these projects have so many layers all making decisions based on what is reported to them.
In most large projects what the CEO is told by the PM is different to what the management team and the technical team are. In this size project there are frequently 5-10 layers of managers.
Until our government decide to make penalties severe for this kind of behaviour then it will continue.
However, they decided not to tell the PO because that could impact the income from the PO contract(thus affecting their own bonuses)
The PO (in all good faith at this point) used horizons data to prosecute the postmasters.
Have you reference for that detail as it’s jokey to the timeline.
My impression was that PO always knew and Fujitsu horizon support remotely logging in was a documented support function.
I assume Fujitsu was billing PO to run the horizon support line including the remote support & remediation.
It's unlikely Fujitsu had to be called in as experts in any PO prosecution vs postmasters because: "In English and Welsh law, computers are assumed to be “reliable” unless proven otherwise."
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/12/update-law-on-computer-evidence-to-avoid-horizon-repeat-ministers-urged
Indeed, but faced with testimony from the sub-postmasters of exactly what they saw happen in some cases literally before their eyes, surely a competent defense lawyer would have insisted on calling someone from Fujitsu to the stand to question them on how what the sub-postmasters claimed to have observed could happen and whether or not the system was, in fact, reliable.
If they did then there's potential for very serious criminal sanctions if it can be shown that person lied or withheld information from the court...
The problem with that is that when Lee Castleton was tried, his legal insurance had run out of money so he had to represent himself, and not being an IT expert or a lawyer was not really able to do so effectively. The Post Office prosecution team considered his case to set the precedent that Horizon could not be questioned as its accounting had been accepted by a senior court, Castleton had been made bankrupt by the judge awarding costs agents him. So no other defendant could contest the Horizon evidence.
"... surely a competent defense lawyer would have insisted on calling someone from Fujitsu to the stand ..."
Having done jury service twice, I can assure you that the time and money would not have been available. In a perfect world the defense would be able to call someone from Fujitsu to testify, but these were considered small time cases of false accounting. I've read a lot of documents from the 2019 court case and the current inquiry, and they show how the Post Office used a tactic similar to plea bargaining in the US. Many of those convicted had plead guilty to false accounting when faced with Post Office lawyers threatening a much more serious charge of theft. It was made clear that prison was less likely if the accused admitted false accounting, although those who avoided prison were usually bankrupted by being forced to pay the back the "missing" money. And as for that missing money, HMRC is now getting involved since the Post Office would have overstated their profits by including the money that many sub-postmasters paid out of their own pocket in desperate attempts to make their accounts balance.
I went down the rabbit hole of looking at the documents because I was interested in the technical reasons for the problems in the Horizon system. The technology on the backend was Oracle DB, Pro*C (Oracle's embedded SQL pre-processor) and until roughly 2012 a messaging platform called Riposte. The latter was ripped out when the "Online" version of the system was rolled out, which also included a rewrite of some of the frontend from Visual Basic 6 to Java. Some examples of the VB code were included in the documents, and it was shocking. Things like numeric values overflowing, and no unit tests that may have caught such shoddy coding errors. Another problem was the permissions system, which was abused by Fujitsu - they had their own staffers with the most elevated privileges making changes to the data that left no audit trail. This included data that was supposed to be *immutable* records of transactions.
In most cases, it seems, it never got to court. The PO investigations team put so much pressure on the postmasters they don't seem to have generally bothered with a lawyer but ended up doing a "deal": either "admitting" it was their own error or even confessing their guilt, in exchange for avoiding court.
If the portrayal of the PO investigations staff in the TV drama (or even in the evidence given the other day) was accurate, you can understand why they felt intimidated.
But I am waiting to hear exactly what statements were made in court by PO/Fujitsu. I think I read earlier this week that someone was asking for immunity from prosecution for perjury before agreeing to appear in (one of) the inquiries?
I wonder what sort of judge would agree to a person testifying in their judicial enquiry, under oath, who had been granted immunity from prosecution for perjury:
perjury
/ˈpəːdʒ(ə)ri/
noun LAW
the offence of wilfully telling an untruth or making a misrepresentation under oath.
You mean like:
Trial 1, Witness A: "I promise that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth."
Trial 2, Witness A: "I promise that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth."
Trial 3, Witness A: "I promise that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth."
Inquiry , Witness A: "I promise that although I committed perjury in trials 1, 2 and 3, to this inquiry the evidence I shall give shall be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth."
?
Forgive me, but I'm not convinced.
Listen to the BBC Raidio 4 episode broadcast today at 10:45 on BBC Sounds. It covers the testimony of a Fujitsu employee in court and her "Afterthoughts" report she made to her managements regretting her role. What happened next? No spoiler here, you will have to listen. BTW the whole series is worth listening to to get a deeper grip of what happened, why and what are the main outstanding questions.
I also listened to the two guys testifying yesterday. They both shared the same problem of inheriting a disaster and taking questions relying on what they had unearthed in their organisations. One was not a politician and did answer some questions. He had done his homework. The other was just a waste of space. Four years and not knowing even the basic timeline. Or did the dog eat his homework?
From the CPS web site:
"Rebuttable Presumption of Correct Functioning of a Computer
Prior to the repeal of section 69 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 by section 60 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, it was necessary to prove that a computer was operating properly and was not used improperly before any statement in a document produced by the computer could be admitted in evidence.
Computer evidence must now follow the Common Law rule, that a presumption will exist that the computer producing the evidential record was working properly at the material time and that the record is therefore admissible as real evidence.
That presumption can, however, be rebutted if evidence to the contrary is adduced. In that event it will be for the party seeking to produce the computer record in evidence to satisfy the court that the computer was working properly at the material time. For detailed guidance as to the law, see <Archbold 9-11 9-15>."
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/computer-records-evidence
But Fujitsu employees did testify as expert witnesses to say that Horizon was reliable. Here's one example: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252527085/Fujitsu-expert-witness-in-subpostmaster-trial-manoeuvred-into-role-public-inquiry-told
I understand that perjury charges are being contemplated.
That is exactly what I was looking for - it was extremely difficult for me to believe that nobody ever questioned a representative of Fujitsu under oath. That they have been questioned is unsurprising, the question now must be what did they know and what did they say. That's a matter for the police but I sincerely hope that their investigation examines just how much pressure the representative was put under by their employer to 'toe the line' and indeed whether Fujitsu deliberately sent a representative who did not actually know the facts to avoid the risk of those facts being disclosed in open court.
Bottom line, if there has been criminal conduct it's CORPORATE criminality and the employee who was used as cannon fodder shouldn't be the only one under investigation.
If we truly want to see an end to these scandals we need senior executives in the dock at the very least.
"In English and Welsh law, computers are assumed to be “reliable” unless proven otherwise."
In real life, it should be the other way around: "assumed unreliable, until proven otherwise"
Poving correctness is generally impossible for anything but the simplest system.
Just a a very large sample space can allow us to pretend that we can rely on the computer.
And then something unforeseen happens, and that Tesla decapitates you.
"Did anyone benefit financially from the errors in Horizon or the unauthorized activities of Fujitsu employees accessing terminals remotely?"
Very likely the Post Office. If the net result was the SPMs paying the PO to rebalance their accounts that must have been where it ended up. But exactly what was it Fujitsu were doing? Presumably trying to cover up some of the failings.
I don't know how the PO did their accounting but I would have though the yearly audit should have been showing that while X stock and services had been sold they took X+Y income. For example my shop has 100 pens in stock and at the end of the sales period I've sold 110 pens. Accounts should pick this up and ask questions shouldn't they and also be able to say the equivalent of 10 pens is owed?
Well, this is retail - so there is always an amount of "shrinkage" (theft and mistakes). But in this case enormously complicated by the fact that when postmasters called the helpline, Fujitsu support staff apparently made direct changes, without audit trails or records, to the databases. Probably trying to be helpful but a significant number probably just made the problem worse, or made it look like it was the postmaster who had done something fraudulent.
PO had dreadful accounting and I find it amazing they were ever signed off TBH.
There were massive suspense account balances £10’s millions which is why, I stairs AIB stopped the cash points deal. I think they were getting done!
That would be interesting evidence.
There was an extraordinary bit of evidence as to how PO wrote off these massive balances.
The auditors are not covered in glory.
"Did anyone benefit financially from the errors in Horizon or the unauthorized activities of Fujitsu employees accessing terminals remotely?"
It seems the "reimbursements" paid by the SPMs were held in suspense accounts for a year or two, then rolled up into PO trading profit (aka loss).
" If so, who and where has the money gone?"
The money stolen from sub-postmasters disappeared into the Post Office accounts, but the lack of balancing that is evident means it was just lost (and the documentation intentionally destroyed) and must have been added to trading revenue at some point. As such it would have reduced trading losses. Since 2016 it would have added to the trading profit, but because because government makes a net payment into the PO as a network subsidy, plus significant tens of millions of pounds to pay for "investment", the PO has always been "cash negative" from the government's point of view.
So the money stolen by the PO would have improved the bottom line trading figures and helped justify directors' bonuses, and at a net level would have potentially reduced the amount taxpayers were having to pay to support PO, although as part of government accounts, even at the horrifying scale of PO thievery it would have been unobservable. However, it doesn't work that way as and when PO have to pay back their stolen money and compensation, because the sums are so large that PO couldn't cover it, and it will have to come from government.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7550/CBP-7550.pdf
Failing any realistic ability to prosecute responsible individuals, it would seem fair to assert 'collective responsibility' to all those 'responsible' executives above a certain grade and fine them (say up to 50% of their assets, or more) in proportion to their level of responsibility in the PO. They may have had nothing directly to do with the fsck-up and consequent persecution, but that is irrelevant in the context of 'institutional' culture and responsibility: you all benefit when things go well, so you should all bear the pain when the institution has behaved badly.
'Lloyds of London' used to operate on this principle: Lloyds 'names' benefited royally when their ships came in, and could literally lose everything, including the shirts off their backs, if the cargo was lost and they had to pay what was owing. That all stopped when the Govt. decided to take notice of the whining that ensued after some very shabby treatment of 'names' by scummy agents operating under Lloyds name back in the eighties (I think it was).
Whatever the rights and wrongs in that situation, there is something to be said for allowing people to actually personally take the hit when the organization that rewards them royally for warming a particular seat causes needless mayhem to other people's lives.
It's a tell tale sign of a corrupt government when such a massive miscarriage of justice has not yet seen all perpetrators doing very very lengthy time in prison and paid financial redress.
In my opinion this is deliberate, because there are bigger things going to come out eventually and nobody wants to set a precedent and trade years on a yacht for a smelly tiny room, although still all inclusive.
CW first reported in 2009. Remind me who was in government then. It continued after the next year. Remind me who was in government then.
Party politics doesn't fit very well here. It's very likely a case of anyone in government who had an inkling not daring to ask questions and the long it went on the more frightening it would be to get them answered. The current government is more unlucky than culpable - they're the ones in office when the music finally stopped.
which government do you think was corrupt? This started in 1995 and went live in 1999 so was it
Major, Blair, Brown, Coalition, Cameron, May, Johnson or Sunak?
I think we can let Liz Truss off, she didn't have the time to screw this one up!
https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/the-post-office-horizon-scandal-an-explainer/#:~:text=The%20project%20at%20one%20point,data%2C%20took%20place%20in%202000.
First prosecutions in 2000.
I was reading about the issues when Blair was in no 10!
Are you saying Labour, Lib dems and Tories all have their hands in the trough?
I've been hauled in front of execs in customer sites more times than I sadly can count due to bugs (perceived, bad use-cases or real) in software we made. In almost every instance, their purchasing agents were also in the meeting informing us if we didn't fix the defects we would be liable for significant £/$/€ penalties up to/including a total refund.
This is why I am so sickeningly apalled by ICL/Fujitsu -- they knew, they've admitted they knew, and they did nothing to fix problems! Even if the Post Office didn't hold them hostage they knew they had defects and absolutely had the wherewithall to fix them.
I absolutely want to see their Directors in jail, and the company handed a massive fine that will be paid DIRECTLY to the subpostmasters! And more of the same for the Post Office officials, for whom ICL/Fujitsu should have email archives of whom was notified and buried their heads should be jailed AND fined as well.
Very sweeping statement, there was a Known Error Log and a team of programmers. You are ignoring the scale of a system there were 6mil transactions on 1000s of terminals, how would you know that you fixed the problem if it only appeared once in a blue moon and only in certain circumstances, a blip mid-transaction for example.
The PO chose to prosecute without any evidence but just relied on the fact they had unlimited funds to grind down anybody that tried to get justice. In fact the PO prosecutors got bonus payments, its a complete farce.
There were far more than that. There were plenty of cases that never got to prosecution because the subpostmaster made up the shortfall with their own money and with it was smaller sums they would often choose to ignore after giving a warning.There were problems even with the test rollout scheme done in the late 1990s.
There is no excuse - and, dammit, the developer's job is to examine those edge cases and figure out where the hell they come from.
I’ve been saying this for decades, and finally my worries are coming to fruition.
We have regulations for lots of things, if you build an unsafe structure and it harms people due to its unsafeness, chances are you’re going to get prosecuted, possibly jail time.
Let’s just put it this way, we would not tolerate the competency spectrum with our airline pilots as we do with software development.
Software, like poor construction design and incompetent airline pilots, needs to have frameworks which protects people from the ineptitude.
Can you imagine a construction company putting up a sign which basically says they are exonerated from any defects and by using the building you accept the terms and conditions.
Isn’t this what a software license agreement effectively is?
6mil transactions on 1000s of terminals
That's really nothing.
how would you know that you fixed the problem if it only appeared once in a blue moon and only in certain circumstances, a blip mid-transaction for example.
I don't know, start from find out when exactly was "once in a blue moon" and what exactly were the "certain circumstances". If the system doesn't have enough logs and has inadequate test coverage, swallow the costs until it has and you can tell exactly what happened, why and you have tests proving issue has been mitigated. Rinse and repeat.
If that was not in place, then they were dealing with cowboy builders.
Some of those postmasters were calling the helpline hundreds of times each, with calls going in on days when they could see a problem at the end of the day/week.
This wasn't some "rare" bug, it was happening hundreds/thousands of times for a lot of the victims, and there were hundreds of victims.
If the post office/fujitsu couldn't work out a problem with the transactions from a single terminal over a set date, and that it had been happening repeatedly then they really were worse than you can imagine, or they just didn't care.
Especially as there were times when the the subpostmasters were on the line to the "help desk", following instructions and it went wrong again whilst they were on the line, meaning there was not only a known issue, but the call centre had the exact time, date, terminal user (and terminal), and transaction as a pointer to the problem. If they couldn't start working out the issue from that information then they really didn't care.
If they'd just bothered following up one of those cases, and actually fixing the problem there wouldn't have been hundreds of people (and their families) with ruined lives over this.
"the company handed a massive fine that will be paid DIRECTLY to the subpostmasters!"
No. A fine AND compensation to the subpostmasters.
And the directors jailed should be those in post at the relevant times. All the relevant times.
Tell me if I'm wrong but...
So the daily balance would double when the screen froze.
The subpostmaster would find money from their own pockets to send to the PO.
The post office now has money from transactions that didn't occur. These may be the same transactions twice but...
Say out of those transactions was £x of stamps x 2. Take that over a week and say x number of stamps have been sold. Reconcilliation would surely show that the number of stamps supplied to the PO was less than that?
Same as car tax, you don't pay your tax twice when renewing it at the PO. The same number plate appearing twice in the same days audit trail?
I'm just glad they are getting hauled over the coals, at last. There was a big article on the BBC site about it and it didn't mention the F word once.
Just a thought......
Any and all convictions surrounding accounting fraud and based upon the Horizon evidence are unsound and should be revoked. There's no need for new legislation or other grandstanding. If the Post Office wishes to pursue a re-trial of a genuine fraud case, they are entitled to do so based upon sound evidence.
Any and all bonuses received by senior Post Office staff over the entire period must, of course, be returned, including associated interest from the payment date. These monies should be distributed to the victims.
Lawyers fees should be stripped out of compensation monies and paid by Fujitsu and the Post Office. These fees might be capped, certainly publicly declared and determined by a tribunal comprising the Speaker and Leaders of the two Houses of Parliament.
Senior people who fail/refuse to remember approximate dates, events and actions should be given time to reflect from a prison cell until their memory recovers.
Those who carried out actions which they knew to be illegal should immediately stand up and personally admit it, and not through their lawyer. Failure to do so will attract a certain prison sentence.
Any lawyer/barrister who failed to act truthfully should be immediately disbarred. In court this is treated as perjury in the usual way.
There's no need for new legislation or other grandstanding.
There are elections around the corner and (especially) the Tories need to be seen as party of the people.
Those who carried out actions which they knew to be illegal should immediately stand up and personally admit it, and not through their lawyer. Failure to do so will attract a certain prison sentence.
In my opinion that's far too late for that. Everyone involved without exception should do time for this.
CPS / Crown Office also need to start charging people with perverting the course of justice / perjury since obviously many PO/Fujitsu staff have lied under oath at trials or in written witness statements.
Although I guess they might want to wait until the end of the public enquiry to get all ducks in a row.
That's the point of the enquiry: to run on and on, pushing everything so far down the road that they can issue the usual "any action is no longer in the public interest" statement. That's how this sort of thing works. Anything else might see people actually held accountable for their actions, and we can't have that can we?
"CPS / Crown Office also need to start charging people with perverting the course of justice / perjury since obviously many PO/Fujitsu staff have lied under oath at trials or in written witness statements."
That'll be interesting in Scottish cases, where the Post Office didn't bring the prosecutions, the Procurator Fiscal did. So it's appallingly bad south of the border, yet worse in Scotland because the state conducted the prosecutions, and now say "oh, it wasn't our fault, we were misled by the Post Office". Will the Procurator Fiscal prosecute its own former managers and prosecutors?
It's a difficult one.
COPFS to give it it's fancy name operates regionally I believe so it depends if details of all these 'extra' prosecutions made their way up to seniors who might have gone 'wait a sec, seems to be a lot more of these recently compared to previous years' and checked.
But given there were I think only about 100 horizon linked prosecutions over the years in Scotland and no doubt there would have been a 'normal' level of pre-horizon fraud it might not have made it through any wheat/chaff filters.
While COPFS should definitely be looking internally to see when anyone was aware that there might be an issue with prosecutions requested by PO and tidying their own stable, I was meaning more that they should start on the principle that any testimony / witness statement from PO / Fujitsu staff was probably fraudulent and going from there, i.e. passing to police for investigation. Although of course they might have a hard time proving those people knew they were lying unless they can find the relevant paperwork / email trail.
Hopefully all the evidence submitted to the PE will help with that, although PO have had to be pushed very hard to turn over evidence I believe and no doubt a lot of it is 'missing presumed deleted by mistake / archive policy etc. etc.'.
Obviously if as seems to have happened with many of the private prosecutions in England the prosecution are found not to have handed evidence which might prove innocence over to the defence any compensatory damages should be massively increased and the lawyers involved investigated for misconduct.
In-house the PO and Fujitsu know or have access rights to know things about Horizon but in Scotland the Procurator Fiscal / staff / Prosecutors only know and only can know what the PO and or Horizon tell them. Unless the PF / Staff received documentary evidence that contradicts the instructions / witness statements they received how on earth are they to know that Horizon was riddled with errors and the PO / F staff have lied to cover up these problems?
I suspect that the person writing this about the process in Scotland knows v. little about how legal proceedings work.
I'm assuming that in Scotland (just like in England & Wales) the Prosecutor is under a duty to disclose to the defence documentary evidence that is adverse to the Prosecutor's case. Down south the PO of course had such material, but north of the border the PF will only have it if the PO had provided it. Knowing the PO as we now do, it probably didn't.
I doubt that the PF or its staff or Prosecutors were told about the Horizon defects.
"Any and all convictions surrounding accounting fraud and based upon the Horizon evidence are unsound and should be revoked. There's no need for new legislation or other grandstanding. If the Post Office wishes to pursue a re-trial of a genuine fraud case, they are entitled to do so based upon sound evidence."
They should all have been quashed, including those that had guilty pleas as soon as the problems were identified as it was manifestly obvious they they were all unsafe. As to trying to prosecute any possible genuine frauds - no chance of that as they would be unlikely to be able to produce untainted evidence.
The lawyers will argue that the Post Office told them the information they were giving them was true.
If you think ANY lawyer will be so much as spoken to in a stern manner over this I have a bridge to sell you. One thing the legal profession is outstandingly good at is making sure mud doesn't stick to them.
On the basis that one of the comments on an earlier article, https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/01/08/sunak_promises_faster_justice_for/ , stated that when he installed Horizon in Post Offices part of the process was to 'wait for the hardware to be configured remotely by Fujitsu' by J.G.Harston states:
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Reply Icon
Re: Remote Access
Almost a decade ago I had a contract replacing post office counter hardware, and digging out my backups, the installation documentation is full of:
"stay on the phone until the Network Operations Centre remotely configures...."
"If the NOC cannot remotely resolve the issue, escalate to...."
It's not in the documentation I've dug out, but the final test was (along the lines of):
Test the system by doing a dummy transaction. Print a system balance. Enter a transaction using "VOID ITEM" as the product. When completed, void the transaction by doing X, Y, Z... Print a system balance to confirm it has reverted to the previous balance. Note in sign-off sheet."
So I would guess that the Post office knew from 'day 1' there had to be remote access.
D'Oh icon because IT IS BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS THE POST OFFICE KNEW ABOUT REMOTE ACCESS FROM THE START AND THEY ARE JUST TRYING TO COVER THEIR OWN BUTTS.
which is different to live remote access to the financial system
this ^
Os it even remote access? Surely this data is uploaded to some central database where the term "remote" doesent really apply and obviously the host system has access to it .
Exactly the same as when you submit a tax return on paper to HMRC , once they receive it they *could* get the tippex out an fuck with it.
Or are they remoting to the box in the PO and altering "yet to be submitted" accounts ? who knows!
They need to define in these hearings exactly what "remote access" means in this instance because everybody probably has a different interpretation.
My question would be how OS and application updates were managed. As a former SysAdmin for. small cluster of workstations, remote access form teh master server was the most efficient means. For a system with terminals distributed literally the length and breadth of the country remote access is the sot efficient and cost-effective means. OK, you could send an engineer round to each and every post office with physical media to do an out of hours update on site, but that would be horrendously expensive and time consuming. Or, I suppose you could just not bother in which case the system would be horribly open to all the zero-day exploits published since each endpoint was installed.
Over to you, Fujitsu Horizon IT specialist.
Remote access wasn't the problem.
Denying it existed, and not having any kind of audit control on its usage, or even on changes made to the system so they could be attributed to Fujitsu or the postmasters is, however, a catastrophic and dumb set of mistakes to make with a system that deals with countless millions of pounds every day.
Get the people from the call centres who told them your the only one
Prosecute
As part of the deal they have to name their manager
Prosecute
And on and on
Claw back any bonus or payouts
When you find the persons responsible
Imprison them for the longest sentence served
Claw back pension payments etc
Move on to Fujitsu and do the same
Include the MP’s who turned away from this and did nothing
THAT IS THE ONLY JUSTICE
The judge's summing up in the class action against the PO makes it fairly clear he thought the technical witnesses from Fujitsu and the PO were either evasive or lying.
It also appears likely that the PO lawyers failed in their legal duty to reveal to the other side facts that would harm their case. This is important: a trial is supposed to be a mechanism for establishing truth, not a win-at-any-cost competition.
The unfortunate thing is that the poor old taxpayer will end up footing the bill, as the PO makes no profit and can't be allowed to cease trading. And if the lying bastards get sent to prison we'll be paying thousands to keep them there. But it'll be worth it.
I suspect ( have always suspected since the story first appeared) that within the PO there was always some element of a culture of mistrusting their sub-postmasters and assuming that each and every one would fiddle the books if given an opportunity. I suspected it because I've seen bosses who automatically mistrust their underlings. - My assumption being that this was "projection" by the way.
In other words, that the PO's senior leaders ( mostly toffs of course) just assumed that their staff/agents (mostly working class ordinary folk) were all at it and Horizon was just confirming their assumption.
Fujitsi have form:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/504421/fujitsu-told-to-pay-corrections-3-point-9m-after-lengthy-legal-battle
I suspect a number of factors were involved....
1. Based on the representation of the Post Office's attitude to their sub post masters it seems likely that there was fundamentally a lack of trust. When Horizon was introduced I suspect that one of the "features" it was sold on was the ability to identify previously undetected fraud/theft. So when such cases started showing up, instead of a "red flag", this was seen as "Horizon is working well". This explains why the Post Office represented this as the case when an objective observer might suppose the opposite. i.e. not a cover-up (at least to start with) but a case of confirmation bias.
2. Once there was the realisation that there was, in fact, a problem, a course of action had been established and a correction to that would have involved admitting to prior mistakes. In the face of that, continuing on the current course was understandably attractive.
3. Fujitsu had a commercial interest in ensuring that the Post Office believed that the system they had paid for was working.
I suspect that the Post Office initially were acting in good faith. Misguided and misinformed good faith, but good faith never-the-less.
The key to all of this is indeed when they realised that this changed from good faith to wilful cover-up. As well as a "moral responsibility" to bear some of the costs of compensation, there are bound to be individuals at Fujitsu who are guilty of perveting the course of justice and should be held accountable as such - along with any managers who were aware, right to the top if necessary.
The trial installation of Horizon across a few sub post offices raised so many concerns that the Post Office union reps claimed it should not be rolled out until they had been addressed. The PO knew about these faults before the national rollout but carried on anyway.
Do we know what those unspecified "concerns" were?
If those concerns had specifically referenced inaccurate balances and/or the ability for Fujitsu to remotely access and manipulate the system without the SPO's knowledge, then fair enough. But if that were the case I would expect this to be reported as "_these_issues_ (specifically and unequivocally) were identified during the trial", rather than the more vague and ambiguous "(unspecified) concerns were raised". Frankly this smells more like just another corporate entity in this debacle (in this case, the union) covering its own rear-end against any possible suggestion that they had failed to protect the interests of their members. i.e. "don't blame us! we SAID there were problems!".
I do not think there has ever been an IT system in history that went live with ZERO defects.
All sorts of things are found in beta/pilot/trial runs of software, some of which may be significant and need to be fixed before going "live", while others are able to be dealt with by documenting and warning/educating the users until they can be fixed (if deemed necessary to fix at all) and yet other problems can go wholly undetected and only ever come to light once fully deployed and implemented in production.
In short: Whatever the concerns were that were raised, they may have been entirely unrelated to the specifics that contributed to this miscarriage of justice. If they were, that would blow this case wide open so why not disclose it?
One of the absolute shittiest things about all of this is it has been clear for a while now that the Post Office have been running down the clock as much as possible on paying out the compensation hoping that some of the claimants die, give up or accept less money.
I've been reading about this whole scandal for donkey's years and it's become depressingly obvious that not one person from Fujitsu [where some individuals in their Development Team have clearly lied on oath] or the Post Office will ever the inside of a courtroom dock. That would require the Establishment to admit they were asleep at the wheel for decades and that does not happen in the UK.
I worked for the Royal Mail [yes I know it's not the Post Office] in the 90s in their Head Office in Edinburgh. The investigators were all ex-coppers from CID sitting on fat pensions and were described to me as "utter bastards".
Let's wait for the phrase "lessons will be learned" which as we know is Civil Service/Government speak for "we got away with it scot-free"
Everyone blames too PO brass or lawyers, but one expect them to be ignorant of the IT problems.
In my book the worst were Fujitsu IT people who were giving evidence that condemned the postmasters and who should have known about the issues .
E.g. the Software Architect Gareth Jenkins.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/garethjenkins
The media has hyped up the pressure on the Post Office and Fujitsu since the broadcast of an ITV television drama about the injustice. Prime minister Rishi Sunak has since promised to introduce legislation to accelerate exoneration of the victims
So politicians react only when the media bring the story to light again - not limited to UK. They don't give a damn about people, about fairness, about justice. The only thing that does matter for these selfish bastards is their public image.
The current CEO of the European division of Fujitsu was like a rabbit in the headlights at the select committee would you give this company your business if the man at the very top is this incompetent ?
He should have been all over this, prepared ready for the grilling he got.
The issue is that there was no 'single source of truth' which is fundamental to any systems veracity.
Fujitsu employees were going in and altering all of the records presumably by SUing a the postmaster using SU privileges.
However, the underlying systems is so bad that it didn't track the SUs.
Nothing in the system can be trusted at all as anything can have been happening including syphoning monies off.
The other major issue here is that Post Office appear to have engaged in will full data mass destruction.
Lets hope that the forgotten backups on the old servers that have been found contain relevant data.
The next question is who were PO's bankers in this period?
Were the suspense accounts real physical accounts somewhere. If so the bank could well have the historical data in its data barns.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who is working for an organization which tells it's employees to prune their mail boxes to a small number of years, certainly less than 5.
On top of this, although I'm not totally sure, for businesses, the legal requirement for keeping full financial records (mainly for tax purposes) is something like 6 years, the same as tax records for ordinary people.
I can well believe that the Post Office no longer has the full records going back to 2014, let alone before that. If they don't legally need to keep the information, why would they?
The lack if an audit trail for SPM remote 'corrections' is shocking however. It does not look like they've been deleted, it seems they were never there in the first place! The financial controls on Horizon should never have been allowed through audit if that was possible. Of course, a remote facility for looking and maybe making changes makes sense, but keep a bloody audit trail!
Appears we have, listening live to the enquiry, another classic case of a manager in charge of technical people that has no technical background. Granted you don't need to be fully technical but you should at least try and understand what your staff are explaining to you. It appears Peter Sewell was one of those managers that was giving a "jobs for the boys" manager role of a technical team yet never bothered learning any of it during his time.
"I don't recall". "I can't say its a technical issue".
On the Channel 4 seven pm news bulletin tonight, the lead story was that the Post Office legal team was so concerned about the unreliability of Gareth Jenkins' testimony, they alerted their insurers about his giving evidence in five trials. The Post Office Board was alerted in 2013 to this (it is minuted). Paula Vennells took over in 2012, but in 2019, being questioned by a Parliamentary Committee she claimed there was no evidence of problems with Horizon.
I would say that I am appalled, but frankly "appalled" does not even come close.
I realize this guy has only been there since 2019, but why does he still have a job?
Why do ANY of them still have a job?
I don't know if the UK has a version of criminal charges against a company, as in the US, but if it does, charges should be laid against the Post Office AND Fujitsu. They've both lied repeatedly.
This whole thing beggars belief.
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