Inquiry hears UK government misled MPs over Post Office IT scandal Officials at the government department responsible for the Post Office sent out misleading information to MPs about court cases relating to the Horizon IT system, an inquiry into one of the UK's greatest miscarriage of justice has heard. Appearing at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry late last week, former minister Vince …
Whilst I agree that the various government ministers bear some responsibilty for the failure to act once it became apparent that there were probems that were not being addressed by the two key perpetrators of this injustice. It must be remembered that the post office is by design an arms-length body set up this way so that goverment cannot interfear with day to day management.
In my view it is clear that:
Fujitsu is responsible for creating a badly malfunctioning system and breaking all the rules around good practice in managing live system correction of errors. Dditionaly the were not it appears honest in their reporting of the the extent of the problem to their client, the post office.
The post office are responsible for not managing their contractor effectively, and not challenging hard enough, not managing the progress of the project and when errors started to occur they prefered to beleive that their people were fraudulent and at fault rather than the system. It begars belief that the post office attributed the sudden rise in fraudulent activity by their trusted staff to the staff going bad. The venal paula whatnot's ability to bury her head in the ground is a negative role model to is all.
but how could they hold the god fearing paula responsible, shes a godly person so way above the scum of the world. so obviously the ungodly scum postmasters had to go to jail. /sarc
FUCK all religions and the false righteousness that all the sky fairy freaks use as a get out of jail card.
You assume that the problem was poor software and sloppy management. I am not convinced that good old theft was not at the core. That money the SPM's were supposed to have stolen ... where did it go? Are there Fujitsu or PO staff which comfortable Swiss bank accounts? Cui bono?
"so that goverment cannot interfear with day to day management."
Various post office ministers were told that they could not interfere with operational matters because of the Postal Services Act. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that the act stipulates this.
There was no money stolen as a result of the Horizon failures. The sums allegedly stolen / misplaced / defrauded were ghost amounts created by the deficiencies in the software.
Where money was paid back or otherwise recovered by the Post Office from SPMs it appears to have gone, eventually, into the PO's own accounts as an element of profit.
https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/podcast-where-did-all-the-money-go/
As an American, I probably shouldn't be sticking my oar in here[1], but that's one thing that makes me scratch my head over this whole misbegotten imbroglio -- as I understand it, many of the accused subpostmasters where dipping into their own pockets, sometimes mortgaging their homes, to make up these putative "shortfalls."
You have to wonder how much ill-gotten money the Post Office made off this financial pillage of its own workers.
Given the bullheaded, agressive prosecution, one might even be led to believe that they were treating these non-existent "shortfalls" as a sort of minor cash cow.
________________
[1] We certainly have enough malfeasance in office of our own to look after (see Thomas, C, and Alito, S, just for starters).
Yup, it is almost as if, when the Post Office Auditors went round, they did not do an effective stock take to find out exactly what had been sold, what services had been provided, or checked transactions with actual customers.
As far as the Post Mistresses' confession to false accounting, I reckon that her lawyer could have attempted a plea of her being under duress, as she felt compelled to do anything to open the office for her local community. But then IANAL.
PS, feel free to comment on this from across the pond. Many UK people have no compunction about commenting on the 'man with blonde hair and a tan'* who wants to be US President again.
*Since I realised that he fitted the description of Rocky in 'The Rocky Horror Show' I simply cannot get it out of my mind. (Oh well, here come the downvotes...)
ISTR some comment about the money going to suspense accounts in the Post Office. i.e. if a branch showed it was £5k down, there would be £5k in a suspense account in the Post Office which should have balanced everything out. This got raised because it would apparently also increase the PO's profitability and consequently exec bonuses, so they were benefitting from the errors.
Of course, that raises another question about why no-one raised the point said suspense account was massively in credit alongside several branches being out of balance.
From what I remember The accounting was bad. The money never went "missing" (as in not in the correct accounts), it just wasn't correctly accounted. Money would come in and the "spare" money would go into an "overages" account and if it wasn't claimed or correctly accounted for within 3-6 months (I cannot remember which) it would be accounted as "profit" as in a donation.
Why the "extra" money didn't ring even more serious alarm bells just goes to show the mentality of senior management.
It's a great question. It seems that these people were prosecuted on the basis of 'stealing money' but in no case so far revealed, has this money been identified.
Are we to believe that Post Office employees are masters at hiding ill-gotten gains? If that were the case, surely they would be better employed in a bigger financial scam.
The money they were forced to pay in fines/settlements ended up as profits and bonuses for the top brass. The bosses had an incentive to perpetuate fraudulent prosecutions.
What happened: The postmaster’s computer said “we took £1,000”. The central computer believed “that postmaster took £2,000”. So someone had to be wrong. Fujitsu didn’t bother trying to find the truth, they didn’t change the incorrect £2,000 to £1,000, they changed the correct £1,000 to £2,000 and accused the postmaster of fraud.
If the postmaster paid £1,000 out of their own pocket to avoid prosecution, the post office had an extra £1,000 to pay bonuses to their CEO.
No. The "lost money" was duplicated sales transactions that never happened.
The terminal would send a sales transaction to the server. The server sent an ack packet back, but that packet didn't arrive at the terminal. The terminal resent the sales transaction, and the server recorded it as a second sale for the same amount.
Two customers in a row could well buy exactly the same thing, but there should have been a unique transaction number generated by the terminal so that the server could identify a re-transmission.
It would be a reasonable interview question for a software developer how to prevent this from happening. (Simplest: Branch computer sends message either some ID. if it doesn’t get a receipt it resends the message with the exact same ID. Central computer accepts only one message with the same ID).
The department overseeing the Post Office engaged in the dissemination of carefully curated information to Members of Parliament regarding the judicial proceedings associated with the Horizon IT system. Vince Cable expressed his profound reliance on the perceived efficiency and ideological purity of those providing counsel when responding to MPs' inquiries.
The department overseeing the Post Office didn't think it was allowed to. Kelly Tolhurst (Post Office minister 2018-20) was in charge when the PO lost the Bates case. They then appealed on the basis that they felt the judge was biased. Tolhurst had been briefed that she didn't have the power to stop it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0xje1jqq71o
It seems that almost every person involved in running, managing, supervising, overseeing, governing, advising (lawyers) is using the defence: "Well I was much too busy to look at the detail for myself. It was underlings/servants/others who told me lies and wrote letters on my behalf." Mandy Rice Davis applies.
They were so ineffective at running the business they should do the honourable thing and pay all the lawyers fees that have been taken from the innocent SPMs. Plus interest.
They weren’t incompetent, they were engaged in criminal activity. Hence their entire earnings and the benefits they gained are the proceeds of crime.
Paying the Lawyers fees is the minimum, they additionally need to pay damages at the levels the courts have awarded in private liable and defamation of character cases, in addition to the lose of earnings etc.
I’d say lawyer cost, compensation for jail time, compensation for the loss of reputation, _plus_ all salaries with raises and pension contributions from the moment the postmaster was fired to the moment the last penny of compensation has been paid. Salary = net salary with post office paying back taxes as needed.
Stop repeating incorrect history.
Horizon is an EPOS and backend finance system for thousands of Post Office branches around the UK, first implemented by ICL, a UK technology company later bought by Fujitsu.
The entire rollout of Horizon was very much driven by Fujitsu, who owned 80% of the company at that time. They even leaned on the British government to make veiled threats about economic problems should the Horizon rollout be delayed.
History of ICL: here [Silicon.co.uk]
Fujitsu leans on government: from Computer Weekly
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