So they are now both trying to throw the other party under a bus.

Bastards the lot of them.

May the bus run over both of them.

It probably will, but actual proof that Post Office senior staff and board were being informed of the problems means that - in the words of a New Zealand enquiry judge - they've been presenting "an organised litany of lies" - in this case to avoid criminal prosecution rather than to simply deflect responsiblity

Only a minor point of pedantry, for which I apologise, but the exact phrasing used by Peter Mahon was -

"orchestrated litany of lies"

So Fujitsu must have informed the courts of the problems and the unreliability of the system, given their employees gave evidence on this in court, right?

This would be the same Fujitsu employees who the Judge in the Horizon trial on 16th December 2019 stated:

I have very grave concerns regarding the voracity of evidence given by Fujitsu employees to other courts in previous proceedings about the known existence of bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon system

Hope that answers your (rhetorical) question.

Telling the enquiry is one thing

Providing the emails is another - and anyone in a CYA situation like this will have kept them

Letting the enquiry run its length with Post Office claiming they didn't know and then presenting evidence that they DID know all along is a true Perry Mason moment and if it's true exposes the utter venality of Vennells and the rest of the board

Been there, done that with a job in previous life.

Company response was to mark me for redundancy with a tiny payout, but when my Solicitor showed all the Slack/Teams messages, zoom call recordings and email, the tiny payout became a years' salary to settle and not be forced to a tribunal!

I've just forwarded a contract term from a CCS contract that says the business shall not recover money from salaries without staff agreement to some internally. Which they did, leaving some with almost nothing. You need to ensure you've something in your back pocket when it all goes wrong, as it will.

"and then presenting evidence that they DID know all along"

The shameful thing is, they're not presenting it in evidence, they're presenting it in a closing statement. If they had this evidence the correct time to come out with it would have been while the enquiry was taking evidence.

Also, are they saying they didn't know the prosecutions were going on? If they did - and it seems overwhelmingly likely that they did - then why didn't they intervene? Public responsibility should have taken precedence over responsibility to a client, otherwise they're risking charges of conspiracy to perverting the course of justice.

They definitely did know, because their staff were called as expert witnesses to testify to the workings of the system in a number of prosecutions. Note that it was just the workings though - the law only required them to demonstrate that the computer system was capable of providing the digital evidence submitted to the court, not to attest to the accuracy of that evidence. There was a presumption in favour of digital evidence that means the burden of proof was effectively reversed in these cases, and it's up to the accused party to prove the evidence is incorrect, rather than the other way around. To my knowledge, I think that might even still be the case in English criminal law.

"Public responsibility should have taken precedence over responsibility to a client, otherwise they're risking charges of conspiracy to perverting the course of justice."

And that should extend to the prosecution solicitors who MUST have been aware of the sheer volume of cases. That all of these seem to have been dealt with in isolation just shows how bad the whole legal system is today?

Would that not constitute grounds for perjury (or similar)? Depending upon the legal status of the inquiry? Sometimes its an offshoot of Contempt of Parliament, sometimes directly perjury and other times not anything at all.

Fujitisu: We told you about the bugs

PO: Our senior leadership was never told

General Public: So Fujitsu told PO about the bugs, but you supported the prosecutions?

Seriously, which lying bastard is the most lying bastard? That's what this is now coming down to!

I hope this is being watched internationally, I also hope there are outcomes declared, significant responsibilities and accountabilities being laid at the feet of actual individuals, not corporations, which in turn could set in place a significant change in the approach to how this type of failing is prosecuted in the future.

We cannot let this type of thing to continue where faceless executives hide behind their corporate cloaks and deny everything!

It's worth noting that "limited liability" only shields shareholders from financial fallout and means at worst they lose everything invested (rather than being hit up for additional monies owed)

Management is not shielded from criminal prosecution or liability for unlawful actions, despite the marked reluctance of British authorities to do this in the case of large organisations

The trouble with your argument is; there is only one shareholder.

The government.

Given that the government has no money of its own if the Post Office fails the Public Purse would be the one to take the hit. Which means us, the British public.

In the litigation that the Post Office has been engaged in the board and managers were playing with our money, bottomless or otherwise, against Sir Alan Bates and all the sub-postmasters. The top brass of the Post Office had no skin in the game and it showed in the reckless squandering of public money trying to defend the indefensible.

As has been said the Post Office really was accountable to no-one and it is about time that the hammer of justice was dropped on those, great and small, who were responsible for this fiasco.

Those running the Post Office at the time should face prosecution for misconduct in public office if sufficient evidence is found. This holds a maximum tariff of life imprisonment.

There are lies, damned lies and then there's implausible deniability.

Sadly I don't see anything unusual here. I'm in a fight with a department of my government to acknowledge the fact that the administration of a care facility wantonly authorized & instructed doctors to ignore EMR system errors, which pretty much directly assisted towards the death of my mate. Their response so far? Ignore that there was even an issue and close the "investigation", an "investigation" where not a single person involved with the incident was interviewed for facts (I asked the doctors involved, they were never contacted at all). After pressing for an appeal, talking to numerous people *and* pressing to get into contact with one of the head counsels of the department, they issued a new ruling: "Still not our problem. But we've forwarded it to a different department".

And here, I await yet another decision. Whilst someone is dead from bad medicinal policies.

Finger pointing, [1]dancing sidesteps and ignoring blame...

did we expect anything less from those who's money is dependent upon keeping the status quo??!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AALREbJZEZk

Agile a-la Post Office: release any old shit, put users in prison when they find bugs and pay yourself massive bonuses from the savings you make on testing.

All I want for Christmas is that the cops turn up on the doorsteps of Post Office and Fujitsu directors on Christmas Eve with arrest warrants.

It was an old school, Waterfall project that delivered the original flawed system. Later revisions that fixed a lot of the front end issues were Agile and had automated tests, whereas the original system only had manual acceptance tests.

Part of the problem was that Horizon had originally been commissioned for a government department, and only repurposed for the Post Office when that project was canned. A lot of that additional functionality was shoe horned into an architecture that hadn't been designed for the features required by post office counter services.

It now appears Subpostmasters will die before receiving their due financial renumeration due to both PO and Fuckjitsu throwing each other in the river. Hence the need to expand Liar's Gate at the Tower to accomodate the sheer weight of bodies!

Justice delayed is justice denied.

I don't think that remuneration is the right word to use here. They are not getting money for services rendered.

I think that a better word would be redress, giving them back what the Post Office extorted from them.

Of course that will not help those who have died before they were made whole.

The entire entirety, eh?

Well that sound definitive.

There I was thinking it was only an entire partiality or a partial entirety.

"We took what Fujitsu said about bugs very seriously and engaged [1]Rentokil to fix the issue. What do you mean the wrong sort of bug ?"

[1] https://www.rentokil-initial.com/

“She has no desire to point the finger at others"

Except when it came to the sub-postmasters!

1.) Unnecessarily complex system architecture. Why no online connection to the mainframe?

2.) Childish belief in said supercomplex system. "Computer is never wrong"

3.) No proper logging at the postmaster terminals to have a ground truth to check against.

A simple hardcopy of the data entered / submitted, and held at the branch, would have saved a lot of people a lot of grief. Not every bug would have been evident from that, but it would have been enough to raise doubts about the system's veracity.

That is what I meant with 3.

Multiple independent, machine- and human-readable logging is key to any serious banking operation.

Apparently some branches took to keeping hardcopy records manually.

And prosecution attempts mysteriously disappeared when they made that known.

Can't have evidence the computer is dodgy appearing in court records now can we?

Regarding your point 2 - that there is a belief that the computer is never wrong, journalist Nick Wallis, on his site postofficescandal.uk, reports that this is currently a legal presumption in the law of England & Wales (I don't know if it also applies in Scotland as well). See:

https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/proposed-amendment-to-legal-assumption-about-the-reliability-of-computers/

He states that there is a proposed amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill in the House of Lords which would address this. From reading his post, it appears that computers have been treated as if they are a "mechanical device", and there is a presumption that "mechanical devices" are working properly, if they look to the user like they are working properly. So as long as the computer hasn't crashed, thrown an error code, etc., it is up to the defendant to prove that is wrong, not for the prosecution to demonstrate that it's right.

If this really is how the Law works in England & Wales (I'm not a lawyer, can't afford to ask one for an expert opinion, etc. etc.) then it clearly needs changing. I hope the amendment makes it into law.

Edit: See Scotech's earlier post above which references the same thing. I missed it while writing this post.

I have worked in internet banking in the past and can tell you that very often software has very serious bugs. Sometimes the hardware, too. Including IBM mainframes.

No software QA to speak of seriously.

The government should mandate V-Model development standards, similar to what is in force for auto, train, aerospace and medical industries. Essentially, document everything, test everything on multiple levels.

Also, mandate extensive logging and archiving of logs.

Proper engineering instead of social science B.S.

Yeah, but that takes TIME and it costs MONEY and, most importantly, it makes those at the top RESPONSIBLE.

We can't have that, now can we ?

V-Model works very effecively for these aircraft. Not a single airframe lost due to software engineering. Full software authority !

One loss of an A400M due to a mess-up in the loading of calibration parameters end of line.

If Airbus can do that, likewise SAP and Oracle can do it for the banking industry. It"s a matter of the right regulation and a minor finacial expense in the grand scheme of things.

I was once in court over a poll tax bill and challenged the veracity of the statements produced by Birmingham City Council's computer system. An affadavit was produced by their chief IT honcho to the effect that "the system was working in the normal manner...". I challenged that, pointing out that wording merely meant that the system was working as usual, not accurately. The basic response from the lay magistrate was something along the lines of "Oh dear" and the court paused whilst the professional lawyer who advised the court (clerk of the court) informed the magistrate of the consequences of acting on that information - that literally thousands of bills and fines might have to be repayed.

Eventually I sugested that I could help resolve the issue by agreeing to pay the £21,37 without prejudice and justice continued in its sureal manner. Best half day I ever took off from work - the entertainment value was superb. When I got to the court there were literally over 1000 cases to be heard and only 1 defendant attending. Me. I had anticipated waiting for ever whilst all of the cases for defendants whose names staarted with A-->M were tried but instead the clerk of the court simply said "is anyone here defending a case" and I stood alone. All the others were dealt with as a single entity in abstentia and as having pleaded guilty.

Ah, the theatre of Justice being seen to be done.

And that's only coming out NOW?

I sincerely hope that one leads to the other in this case. I have long suspected that the issues in a system of that complexity (The 'BEDS' referred to) were known of by both parties, but only understood by Fujitsu, with the PO (at all levels!) not understanding what most of the issues meant.

I hope several people from both parties are found guilty of criminal behaviour and get hammered both financially and reputation ally without the benefit of Directors liability insurance.

Some person or group high up seems to have failed in the duty of oversight - probably under pressure from the 'top' - leading to the worker bees being percecuted and in some cases dying as a result.

That said, the ones I really want to swing are the legal professionals who advised the PO to continue with prosecutions despite the facts, or at least the suspicion of problems. Last I heard was that the Solicitor's Regulatory Authority was investigating quite a few of them....I hope these bastards don't get off Scott free!

All in all, this is a sorry tale of professional misconduct throughout the corporate structure.

Is it possible to freeze these Corporate crooks pensions.

Until report and prosecutions have been carried out, or is there going to be another cover up?

Reduce the people involved, final pension grades to pay for compensation and the legal costs.

Gov IT projects at its best.

No lesson learned and happen due to incompetence and quality of people running these projects

with people too scared to hold the red flag up. No balls "yes people" with nobody taking ownership.

Same happening in Government, If I lie to the government it's fraud and I go to jail after waiting 5

years on remand, if an MP lies it's Politics and nothing happens.

For any system which is more than one small program, there will always be bugs. Some bugs may be there for decades before being discovered.

Any improvement will introduce or expose bugs (as you move off the well trodden path).

Your home software gets updates regularly. The software your run your business on gets updates. These updates are usually fixes to bugs.

Anyone who thinks software is bug free should be nowhere near software projects. Why should "your software" be any different. They should go and bury their head in the sand and wait for the tide to come in. If I was told there are no defects - I would not believe them.

I worked on major mainframe software, and we would get charts of defects found over time by month. Initially there was a higher proportion of higher severity defects. Over time this proportion diminished. These sorts of charts should have been available to the Post Office management.

And it stinketh greatly.

The above comments are pretty much saying what everyone thinks about this whole debacle. The fact seems to be that these people have no shame. Blame anyone but 'me', I did 'nothing wrong' (which begs the question: 'did you do anything right?').

In the words of Dr. Johnson, providing advice to a rival author: 'Have you considered taking up plumbing?'

*We are officially allowed to say "shit" as the wonderful Mishal Hussein used that word six times on the BBC Radio 4 'Today' programme interviewing a then Tory minister on why he had used it in the House of Commons. Strangely Paula Vennells was never interviewed by her, I wonder why.

Arguably even worse, but no serious consequences. We live in a corrupt world and many of our leaders think it is OK because Moscow, Beijing and New Dehli are even more corrupt.

1) If the software was wrong, and consequently there was no money lost, where did the money the sub-postmasters were forced to (re)pay go?

2) Today we find that Post Office IT staff were regularly made redundant and then, virtually immediately, rehired on consultant salaries of up to 3 times their original salary. See: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366617210/Post-Office-IT-department-fired-and-rehired-friends-at-exorbitant-rates-says-former-HR-chief Corruption inside PO?

.. for Vennels to still be claiming that she knew nothing about it!