Otherwise he would get himself and his mates into even deeper shit

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.

Then whatever the victims say was paid is what is owed.

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.

Pardons will be unacceptable to the victims, as in law it would mean that they still stole the money and they wouldn't get any compensation.

How about heads on the block, actual bodies in cells. This shitshow and the many years of misery it has caused shouldn't be swept under the carpet with a monetary sum.

It must be that plus criminal proceedings.

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".

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?

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?

"In English and Welsh law, computers are assumed to be “reliable” unless proven otherwise."

That's a view that is so common everywhere, AI is supposed to always work fine, auto-driving cars are supposed to be efficient and safe (or one of those anyway).

"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.

" 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.

Each government since the start of the debacle is culpable.

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?

Are you saying Labour, Lib dems and Tories all have their hands in the trough?

Yes.

the best fate for these sharks is for their name to become a byword for criminal incompetence. And I have every faith the decent average Brit will take the challenge on with gusto.

Who remembers when "An Archer" was slang for £2,000 ?

at least we got a few decent books about the failings in the prison systems out of that!

Does "An Andrew" mean £12million?

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.

It seems there were at least 700+ blue moons ...

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.

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.

> Some of those postmasters were calling the helpline hundreds of times each

…and all being told, according to reports, “you’re the only person who’s seeing this behaviour”.

The whole thing stinks.

"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 long running enquiry is a problem in itself as it's furth postponing the actions that were already well overdue when it started.

Then it's a good time to start building a few new prisons. So there is no excuse to give suspended sentences because there are not enough places.

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?

"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.

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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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.

That might just be network connectivity though which is different to live remote access to the financial system itself.