Horizon redress still a mess, MPs say – and Fujitsu hasn't paid a penny

More than a year after MPs warned that victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal were still waiting for compensation, Parliament says the system meant to pay them remains slow, bureaucratic, and flawed – meaning thousands of sub-postmasters are still fighting for payouts while taxpayers pick up the bill. A new report from the …

[Aladdin Sane]

Set the compensation to accrue at 8% AER from the date of the original faulty data and invoice those bastards at Fujitsu.

[heyrick]

...and when it reaches a certain point, start slinging executives behind bars.

Also, disallow any future and ongoing contracts until this situation is fully resolved.

[rg287]

...and when it reaches a certain point, start slinging executives behind bars.

As a general rule, I am a prison reformist - short sentences don't work, Norwegian model has lower recidivism, etc.

I do have an exception though - debtor's prison. There are some people for whom fines make no difference (cost of doing business) or who abuse the system to avoid paying out or hide behind a corporate shield. As if corporate crime is committed by a legal fiction - not real humans doing bad things. What we can take from them is some years of their life, and however rich they might be, that's a hard cost that's the same for everyone.

Only for egregious cases of course. No sense in locking up everyone who has missed a month of some loan payment. But this would certainly qualify - especially since many of the victims were incarcerated as a result of the Post Office & Fujitsu's negligence.

[Peter2]

In some cases, the disclosure of Post Office documents can take months, slowing claims that already stretch back years.

To be fair any records from 30 years ago are going to be on paper.

Producing paper records from 30 years ago is likely to take months because paper records are a bit manpower intensive to search.

[Aladdin Sane]

**To be fair**

[KittenHuffer]

"To be fair" the postmasters should not have been prosecuted in the first place.

"To be fair" Fudge-it-sue should not have denied that the system could not be wrong in any shape or form.

"To be fair" the Post Orifice should not have been able to be (pretty much) judge, jury and executioners.

"To be fair" the denials from the above should not have gone on for over a decade after it was realised (and internally admitted) that there were issues.

"To be fair" the gummint should have done something about it far sooner.

"To be fair" the postmasters should not still be waiting for compensation more than 6 years after the first major court case went their way.

Personally I'd say there was not a lot that was fair about the entire shit show!

[Peter2]

Which is a good argument for simply paying everybody involved a lump sum or a similar solution.

If the process is to investigate every case individually with all of the paperwork from 30 years ago plus post office internal records etc then with the best will in the world producing the paper records is going to take a lot of time.

This is why practically everybody has since switched to digital records; you can produce everything pertinent with a few searches.

[Doctor Syntax]

"you can produce everything pertinent with a few searches."

Until the hard drive it was on dies. Or it was burnt to CD and the claimant's latest laptop doesn't have a CD drive. Digital records canand do get lost.

[Peter2]

Any serious organisation has things centralised. Roaming or redirected profiles push storage back to the server, where it's on two hard drives and then backed up offsite etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

"you can produce everything pertinent with a few searches"

From a Fushitsu platform? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

We did have computers 30 years ago so "no" everything wasn't on paper and I doubt what they need is on paper... sounds to me like they're simply dragging their feet and hoping the claims will go away.

[wiggers]

The whole world used to run on paper records quite happily. It's computerisation that's slowed everything down! My expenses after a trip used to take half an hour. Then they computerised it and you had to set aside half a day! And then they have to "upgrade" the system every few years to something even slower and more complex.

[Peter2]

The whole world used to run on paper records quite happily. It's computerisation that's slowed everything down! My expenses after a trip used to take half an hour. Then they computerised it and you had to set aside half a day! And then they have to "upgrade" the system every few years to something even slower and more complex.

The overall amount of work probably hasn't actually changed. It's just that in the old days then you basically just passed all of the work onto the people processing it in accounts.

With computerisation they've presumably eliminated the work from the accounts department and passed it onto the person making the expenses claim.

[rg287]

The overall amount of work probably hasn't actually changed. It's just that in the old days then you basically just passed all of the work onto the people processing it in accounts.

With computerisation they've presumably eliminated the work from the accounts department and passed it onto the person making the expenses claim.

Quite true. The amount of work won't have changed but people are less efficient at processes they only do occasionally. Consequently, the overall prodoctivity has probably dropped. What took the poster half an hour to submit then likely took an accounts spod another half hour to bash out - because they do it all day every day.

If the poster is now taking half a day to fumble through a horrible unintuitive system, then the net productvity is 25-33% - what was 1 hour of labour (2x 30mins) is now 3-4 hours of labour.

There's something to be said for professional services. Turns out all those "pen pushers" were actually better at their jobs than you or I am!

[Doctor Syntax]

"My expenses after a trip used to take half an hour."

My expenses claims used to take an infinite amount of time. The bastards always seemed to find some IR rule that said it couldn't be paid. One of the many reasons I finally quit.

[heyrick]

I didn't downvote but I'd like to point out that I contacted the NHS PCSE for my childhood medical records (70s and 80s) and the hard part was proving I'm me (not helped by living in France). Once that was sorted, stuff was printed and mailed quite quickly.

So it is possible, even if the records were originally on paper...

[Anonymous Coward]

"To be fair any records from 30 years ago are going to be on paper."

So what? The identities of those who got fucked over by the Post Office are already known no matter if their records are on paper or spinning rust or stuffed down the back of the saintly Paula Vennels's sofa. Worst case, it would only take a couple of days to compile a list of those who went to jail, another list of those who copped a plea, a list of those who got put out of business or got bankrupted and another list of those who paid alleged shortfalls from their own pocket. For each of these categories just immediately award reasonable compensation: say £2M+ for those who went to jail, £500K for those who copped a plea, etc. There would be no need for paperwork unless a victim claimed their actual losses were greater than this hypothetical automatic compensation. Any cases like that could go to independent arbitration or the courts.

And of course all the victims automatically get their convictions and criminal records quashed, bankruptcies and trashed credit histories put right, etc.

An added advantage of this approach is it doesn't matter if the crooked arseholes at the Post Office and Fushitsu claim they can't find paperwork, the dog ate their homework, a bad boy did it and ran away, etc. The victims get compensated fairly and promptly. Which has to be the top priority.

[rg287]

To be fair any records from 30 years ago are going to be on paper.

When this process notionally started over a decade ago, those records would only have been 20 years old. They've had a decade, there is no "to be fair" about it.

[alain williams]

If they wait long enough ...

many more sub-postmasters will be dead. How do you compensate the dead ?

Also: those guilty will be retired or dead and thus deemed beyond liability.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: If they wait long enough ...

Retired isn't beyond liability. They can die in jail if need be.

[Anonymous Coward]

slow, bureaucratic, and flawed

in line with requirements?

[MarkMLl]

WTF's "Capture"?

"71. Capture was an in-house Post Office Ltd accounting system used in some branches between 1992 and 1999.[156] It predated Fujitsu’s Horizon software, which was introduced in 1999.[157] At least 19 versions of the software were deployed during this period, with up to 2,500 “users”.[158] In January 2024, press articles began reporting that, like Horizon, the Capture software was capable of generating false shortfalls, and there were known errors and bugs in the software.[159] In April 2024, DBT commissioned an independent investigation into Capture by forensic accountant auditors, Kroll."

"156 Capture operated as backoffice software, similar to an excel spreadsheet, into which sub-postmasters entered daily cash and stock information. The software aggregated these figures and transferred them onto weekly balance sheets, which sub-postmasters printed and submitted to the Post Office. Kroll, Independent Investigation into Capture Accounting Software, 10 September 2024, p1"

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/52110/documents/289545/default/

So presumably in this context that means "in-house written", rather than being another ICL monstrosity. However the report goes on to identify the sort of shortfalls etc. that Capture implied, and that around fourteen people had been disciplined.

My first thought there was that with that history, the Post Office etc. should have been a bit more cautious when it came to Horizon; however it turns out that Kroll (the auditors) were only looking at this in 2024.

Now, /El/ /Reg/, couldn't some truncated version of that appeared in the article, rather than just throwing in the name "Capture" without explaining that that specifically affected PO staff rather than being some wider government SNAFU?

[Anonymous Coward]

redress is still on the horizon then

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Yep. Delayed in the mail.

I wish that was a joke.

[Sub 20 Pilot]

Yet the shitshow of a government we have here is happy to agree to pay the odius turd Mandelson a load of compensation for losing his job even though he was thrown out of three ministerial or government posts over the years.

There will be a breaking point somewhere and once that is reached there will be civil war in the UK.

[ChoHag]

I think we reached that point many years ago but I've often said (not in here) that while there is a breaking point, we need to get far, far beyond it before anything actually breaks.

Nobody is going to bring out the guillotines because they've been slightly put out by a pompous official, however unjustly. People are *actually dead* from this scandal, and not only because of age, and yet fundamentally nothing has changed. The bread is very good (well OK this is England: let's just say there's a lot of bread) and the circus is great fun.

Things will appear to be fine on the surface, until one day they're suddenly not. Very, very not.

[jonathan keith]

And then everyone involved will be enormously surprised one morning when people start being strung up by their ankles from lamp-posts. I don't think the corporate and political elites realise how angry the public is with them.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

They do. Oh, they do.

There's a reason why Mark Zuckerberg is buying up a substantial chunk of Kauai

... Already, there are two sprawling mansions, a gym, a tennis court, several guesthouses and treehouses, a water system, and even a tunnel leading to an underground shelter reportedly the size of a professional basketball court and equipped with blast-resistant doors and an escape hatch. (Emphasis added)¹

Oh, yes, they do.

____________________

¹ Robb Report: Mark Zuckerberg Quietly Added Another 1,000 Acres to His $300 Million Compound in Hawaii

[Anonymous Coward]

Compensation can be achieved, just not for the innocent

Slave Compensation Act 1837

British slave owners received approximately £20 million in compensation for the loss of their "property" when slavery was abolished in 1833, which is equivalent to around £16.5 billion today. This compensation was paid to over 40,000 slave owners, but none of it went to the freed enslaved individuals themselves.

Since some of the payments were converted into 3.5% government annuities, they lasted until 2015. Yes, that 2015.

[Eclectic Man]

Very sad news

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8eg0n6n1ygo

"

Tributes are being paid to a former sub-postmaster who has died without receiving full compensation after being wrongly convicted during the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

Parmod Kalia, 67, ran a branch in Orpington, south-east London, for 11 years before he was accused of theft and spent six months in prison. His conviction was later overturned but he said the ordeal "broke him".

...

When Kalia had his conviction quashed at Southwark Crown Court in 2021, the Post Office did not oppose their appeals on the grounds that it was not in the public interest to pursue a retrial.

However, the Post Office said if there had been retrials, there was a reasonable prospect of conviction and therefore Mr Kalia was not owed full compensation for malicious prosecution.

"

These Project Horizon apologists are shameless.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not very hard really

I'm actually ok with the taxpayer funding the compensation so that those who need it get it before they die. The condition of this would be that a proportion should be recoved from Fujitsu but more importantly that the postoffice snr managment should go to jail with pensions, bonuses and other benefits recovered to contribute to compensation, that any other officers of the post office who committed perjury or covered up evidence supporting the defence should go to jail, that any officers of Fujitsu who were found to have aided the illegal activities of the Post Office or who committed perjury or withheld evidence supporting the defence should go to jail.

I don't think I'm really asking very much.