Brit MP demands answers from Fujitsu about Horizon IT system after Post Office staff jailed over accounting errors
- Reference: 1591287380
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/06/04/fujitsu_post_office_beis_committee_questions/
- Source link:
Darren Jones, Labour MP and chairman of Parliament's Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, wrote to Fujitsu and the Post Office on Wednesday to raise the issue of the strife sub-postmasters have been put through at the hands of the software.
In the early 2000s, the Post Office commissioned the new IT system, with the technical responsibility for it resting with Fujitsu. Horizon, an accounting system deployed in post offices across the UK, contained fatal flaws that generated false records; the system would wrongly record huge deficits in sub-postmasters' takings that did not exist.
Under the well-known principle of "computer says no," the Post Office and Fujitsu ignored problems with the system and lashed out at sub-postmasters who complained when the Post Office ordered them to make up these fictitious shortfalls out of their own pockets. Some were lucky; Fujitsu and Post Office technicians remotely accessed accounts to correct the balances, unknown to the sub-postmasters.
Others who refused to accept the Fujitsu and Post Office version of events were privately prosecuted by the Post Office, using evidence provided by Fujitsu, and jailed. In 2015 [1]a Post Office spokesman flatly denied the problems to The Register , claiming "there have been exhaustive investigations which have not found any evidence of systemic problems with the Horizon system."
Jones wrote in a letter [2]published (PDF) on the Parliamentary website: "The Committee's evidence session on 24 March on the Post Office and Horizon was postponed due to the COVID-19 lockdown. However, the Committee is keen to hear from the witnesses who were scheduled to appear and I would therefore be grateful if you could answer the following questions."
Among other things, Jones asked whether Fujitsu accepted "that there were some major issues with Horizon" and asked how the firm dealt with them. Referring to [3]a settled High Court lawsuit , he also wrote: "The Judge established that there were errors and bugs within Horizon and that remote access to Horizon terminals was possible and transactions could be changed without a sub-postmaster knowing… Why did it take a highly expensive court case to establish these facts?"
Fujitsu said in a statement to The Register : "Fujitsu takes the judgement in the second trial of the Post Office Group Litigation very seriously. While Fujitsu was not a party to the litigation, we are conducting a thorough process to review the court's statements in detail. As a long-term partner to UK public and private sector organisations, Fujitsu is dedicated to supporting our customers, our employees and the people they serve in the UK."
The Criminal Cases Review Commission is slowly referring convicted sub-postmasters' cases to the Court of Appeal, 47 having been sent to senior judges for review so far. In a recent statement the body [4]said : "All of the CCRC referrals so far are being made on the basis of an abuse of process argument concerning issues with the Post Office's Horizon computer system which may have had an impact on the safety of the convictions."
The episode has also triggered a wider review into corporate private prosecutions brought by companies who are "victim, investigator and prosecutor."
While such a review will certainly not change anything – it would disrupt BBC TV Licensing and train companies, to name but two, if private prosecution powers were taken off them – it will cause further discomfort to Post Office managers. ®
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/20/post_office_deny_premature_litigation_horizon_it/
[2] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5801/cmselect/cmbeis/correspondence/BEIS-Committee-Chair-to-Fujitsu.pdf
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2019/12/12/post_office_horizon_case_settled/
[4] http://ccrc.gov.uk/the-ccrc-refers-eight-more-post-office-cases-for-appeal-bringing-total-to-47-so-far/
Re: WTF?
If you want to hear all about this sorry saga the BBC are running an interesting tale on radio 4 at the moment catch up on BBC Sounds but mind the blood preasure.
Computers seldom make mistakes, they just respond to a series of commands and carry out those commands without giving them a second thought, in fact no thought goes on at all. Humans on the other hand are very good at making mistakes and worse, very good at putting the blame onto some one or something else, in order to draw attention away from their errors. This is such an absolutely disgusting tale of blindly putting computational results above the human level that I believe many people involved actually began to think that they had indeed made errors! What I can't understand is that testing the system thoroughly, proir to release, should have shown up the system errors that led to this sorry mess! So, to my mind at least, whomsoever commited the system to go live, without having a thorough enough testing regime to spot such errors, should carry the can in this case.
Heads ought to roll
I followed this in the Private Eye for many years. What the senior post office management did to the sub-postmasters was truly criminal
This podcast tells the story https://www.private-eye.co.uk/eyeplayer/play-367
There ought to be prison sentences for the directors that brought this about but, once again, there will be no comeback. It is looking less likely that there will be a proper enquiry
Background listening
Any rightpondians who haven't been paying attention to this astounding piece of corporate fuckery can catch Radio 4's account, broadcast as a series of five 15-minute programmes throughout this week. It's not just a story of poor software design and inadequate testing, but also of senior post office managers telling barefaced lies to their sub-post-people and in court, and innocent people losing huge sums of money, and being fined and jailed, as a result.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j
Any chance
of criminal proceding again post office managers.... ohh they've all retired.... well best not to
Meanwhile, old squaddies who commited crimes in Northern Ireland are still being chased by the police/law for events 40 years ago
Sorry but post office managers committed crimes by having innocent people jailed.
If we as a people are prepared to let those guilty go free, then what the **** is the point of the law... just like cummings and his lockdown eyetest.
The episode has also triggered a wider review into corporate private prosecutions brought by companies who are "victim, investigator and prosecutor
In the UK, the prosecutional role was removed from the Police into the CPS years ago because of problems. Why on Earth have private companies been allowed to continue when this system has shown to be broken?
WTF?
"Fujitsu and Post Office technicians remotely accessed accounts to correct the balances, unknown to the sub-postmasters"
Has nobody heard of security? Access controls? Audit trails? FFS.
Who is responsible for the design and sign-off of this system? IANAL but this sounds like something wide open to civil proceedings to me.