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Software The Courts Crime United Kingdom

Post Office Workers Convicted of Theft Due To Faulty Software Have Names Cleared (bbc.com) 49

Britain's Court of Appeals has cleared a group of 42 sub-postmasters and postmistresses for theft, fraud and false accounting. They were convicted, with some imprisoned, after the Post Office installed faulty software in the branches where these office operators worked. The BBC reports: Following the convictions - including theft, fraud and false accounting -- some former postmasters went to prison, were shunned by their communities and struggled to secure work. Some lost their homes, and even failed to get insurance owing to their convictions. Some have since died. They always said the fault was in the computer system, which had been used to manage post office finances since 1999.

The Horizon system, developed by the Japanese company Fujitsu, was first rolled out in 1999 to some post offices to be used for a variety of tasks including accounting and stocktaking. But from an early stage it appeared to have significant bugs which could cause the system to misreport, sometimes involving substantial sums of money. Horizon-based evidence was used by the Post Office to successfully prosecute 736 people. But campaigners fought a long and series of legal battles for compensation in the civil courts, which have been followed by referrals by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
A Post Office spokesman said: "We sincerely apologize to the postmasters affected by our historical failures. Throughout this appeals process we have supported the quashing of the overwhelming majority of these convictions and the judgment will be an important milestone in addressing the past."

Long-time Slashdot reader Martin S. reacts: As a software geek, the part I find most troubling is that blind faith that those in authority placed in the software without proper accounting. Accounting systems and Software are deterministic, well they should be. IF the system/software worked correctly, this missing money must have shown up somewhere. Software defects are always traceable. It might be expensive and time consuming but persistence will win in the end. Somebody somewhere is responsible for this and defacto framing of these people is criminal in principle, if not in law.
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Post Office Workers Convicted of Theft Due To Faulty Software Have Names Cleared

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  • by kot-begemot-uk ( 6104030 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @05:54PM (#61306886) Homepage
    You are joking. Finding accountability at the top in the old UK Post Office and/or BT is like seeing a sparkly unicorn with rainbow jet afterburners. About same probability (if you did not have some really magic mushrooms).
  • 736 People?? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @05:54PM (#61306888)

    Horizon-based evidence was used by the Post Office to successfully prosecute 736 people.

    They quite literally ignored/dismissed what these 736 accused people said in their defense, blindly believed the one, singular system that they obviously didn't audit, and convicted them on that "evidence"?

    Whoever prosecuted the accused, and everyone else that supported them in those accusations, should get 736 consecutive sentences equivalent to what were given to those convicted.

    • Evidently, I misread part of the story - but wondering how many of the other 600-ish other ones still are/were in a similar situation.

      • by Sique ( 173459 )
        I wonder how you can misread sentences like this:

        In December 2019, the Post Office agreed to pay almost £58m to settle the long-running dispute with more than 500 sub-postmasters and postmistresses affected by the scandal.

        (taken directly from T.F.A.)

        • by Sebby ( 238625 )

          I wonder how you can misread sentences like this:

          In December 2019, the Post Office agreed to pay almost £58m to settle the long-running dispute with more than 500 sub-postmasters and postmistresses affected by the scandal.

          (taken directly from T.F.A.)

          So sue me.

        • So the OP is right - they believed some flawed software (and its developers) over what 700+ people said.

          • by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Saturday April 24, 2021 @02:04AM (#61307930)

            So the OP is right - they believed some flawed software (and its developers) over what 700+ people said.

            That's true of the judges, however the Post Office and Fujitsu knew that the evidence of from the system was often wrong and actually lied about it. They stood up in court and claimed that the system was flawless. The former head of the post office was fully informed about the problem and decided not to go back on the testimony they had given. Having been forced into admitting that they had done wrong and investigating this, the post office then made a special set of procedures that made it almost impossible for the postmasters involved to access the information they needed. There are a quite a number of people from both companies that should be going to prison for purgery, obstruction of justice and fraud. The BBC radio series on this is excellent if you can get access to it.

            • by bungo ( 50628 )

              Even better. We all know that CEOs get paid the big bucks because they are worth it, and take personal risks with their careers, as if they were shown to be liars that perverted the course of justice then they would be toxic for life. Maybe go to prision.

              Let's see how that worked out -

              From https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/23/post-office-aggressive-pursuit-of-staff-ex-boss-paula-vennells [theguardian.com]

              "When the Rev Paula Vennells stepped down as chief executive of the Post Office in February 2019, she walked a

              • Astutely observed. The false excuse offered for the incredible wealth showered on top executives in the Anglophone world since the 1970s is compensation for the awesome risks they take on when managing the fortunes of an entire enterprise. But that excuse is utterly transparent nonsense.

                CEOs routinely "negotiate" compensation packages that make them immensely rich even when they leave nothing but smoking ruins behind, and the idea that they have any legal exposure due to their position is preposterous. In t

        • £46m of which went to the lawyers.
          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Saturday April 24, 2021 @03:58AM (#61308046) Homepage Journal

            Yep, the average payout was around £24,000 per victim. Doesn't seem like a lot considering they got criminal convictions, lost their jobs and other opportunities, some did jail time and of course the mental anguish of fighting for years to clear their names.

          • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

            £46m of which went to the lawyers.

            You say that like it's supposed to mean something. If the lawyers front all of the cost of a lawsuit and shoulder all of the risk...ofc they are entitled to a generous payment. Don't like it? Hire your own damn layer, and shoulder your own damned costs while taking all of the damned risk.

        • by k2r ( 255754 )

          > .sig: Sique (sic!) *sigh*

    • Re:736 People?? (Score:5, Informative)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @07:57PM (#61307248)
      And it's not like this hasn't happened before, UK banks routinely prosecuted their own customers for fraud in the 1990s when the fault was in the banks' systems, leading to some appalling miscarriages of justice. Here's a note on one, the Munden case [ic.ac.uk].
    • The system _was_ audited. The auditors were told not to find or report any faults.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by thsths ( 31372 )

      Yes, that is probably correct.

      But one juicy detail is that these were private prosecutions, conducted by private lawyers paid with private money. They were not public prosecutions, and it seems that they were not conducted with the necessary due diligence. It just reeks of withholding of evidence.

  • by msauve ( 701917 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @06:04PM (#61306914)
    > cleared a group of 42... used by the Post Office to successfully prosecute 736... we have supported the quashing of the overwhelming majority of these convictions...

    Are UK Post Office employees required to know math(s), or did they use the same faulty software to determine the numbers? 42 is not a majority of 736.

    Will they now be prosecuting (or firing) those responsible for testing the software before purchasing/deploying it?
    • Re:Uh, what? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @06:08PM (#61306918)

      Are UK Post Office employees required to know math(s), or did they use the same faulty software to determine the numbers? 42 is not a majority of 736.

      There's a linked story [bbc.com] that goes into more details - basically these were people that owned 'local franchises' of post offices, and they used software for, I guess, internal accounting (there's not much details).

      Will they now be prosecuting (or firing) those responsible for testing the software before purchasing/deploying it?

      From that same story:

      Has anyone been held accountable?

      So far, nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable, although the High Court judge said he would refer Fujitsu to the Director of Public Prosecutions for possible further action because he had "grave concerns" about the evidence of the company's employees.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by reg ( 5428 )

        From that article:

        In December 2019, at the end of a long-running series of civil cases, the Post Office agreed to settle with 555 claimants. It accepted it had previously "got things wrong in [its] dealings with a number of postmasters", and agreed to pay £58m in damages. The claimants received a share of £12m, after legal fees were paid.

        It looks like this group got ripped off twice. Once by the Post Office and then by their lawyers... That's only £82,000 per person, but £46m for the lawyers.

        • Re:Uh, what? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by scdeimos ( 632778 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @07:03PM (#61307068)

          It looks like this group got ripped off twice. Once by the Post Office and then by their lawyers... That's only £82,000 per person, but £46m for the lawyers.

          Are you surprised by this? The only real winners in any legal proceding ever are the lawyers.

          • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

            Are you surprised by this? The only real winners in any legal proceding ever are the lawyers.

            Your capitalist overlords salute you for parroting this bootlicking narrative. If you don't want lawyers working on contingency (so they make all of the financial investment in a case and take all the risk in losing) then hire your own damn lawyer and shoulder your own damn risk in a lawsuit.

    • fractions of a penny

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Well, no it is Fujitsu in the firing line by law they provided false testimony and are in fact criminally and legally liable. Those experts from Fujitsu should now be prosecuted and punished for lying under oath with regard to the qualities of their software. Horizon evidence, drops criminal charges square on Fujitsu and any UK government officials who criminally confirmed it's accuracy. YOU CAN NOT LIE IN COURT and they should be fucked by the legal system in the UK were it not so corrupt.

    • "42 is not a majority of 736."

      It is not claimed to be. The Post Office spokesperson said they supported quashing the majority, not that a majority had been quashed.

  • by Iamthecheese ( 1264298 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @06:51PM (#61307026)
    Making it easier to convict people is not hard on crime. Neither is harsher sentences. Stop supporting politicians who promise to get "hard on crime" via easy answers.
  • Therac-25 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by luis_a_espinal ( 1810296 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @07:03PM (#61307070)
    Given that people's lives were destroyed (and some died without ever recovering from this), we can say this bug is around the same deadly category as the classic " Therac-25" incident. Jesus.
  • I must of put a decimal in the wrong place

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      And failed English class.

  • How come they arent sued off the planet for not deliverying working software ?
  • Computers are tools. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by BitterOak ( 537666 )

    When a driver puts their Tesla on "auto-pilot", and then doesn't pay any attention to the road, and when that car subsequently hits and kills some pedestrians, do we allow the driver to simply blame the car and get off scott free? No, the driver is held accountable. The car is merely a mechanical tool which we use as a means of transportation. Features like auto-pilot can make the driver's job easier, but the driver is ultimately accountable.

    If you use a computer accounting system to file your taxes, and

    • How do you know the invalid information was visible to postmasters? Maybe it was only accessible upstream.
    • by johnw ( 3725 ) on Saturday April 24, 2021 @01:48AM (#61307920)

      It seems logical then, if a computer accounting system is used in a place of work, such as a post office, the people operating the computer and submitting the accounting reports should be responsible, particularly for large scale and repeated errors, which seems to be the case here. No one will be charged for one wrong number on a balance sheet (unless it was clearly deliberate). The fact that these people were charged criminally suggests large scale and multiple discrepancies. It seems that regardless of "buggy software" they should bear some responsibility.

      It's not quite clear what you're trying to say here. Who do you mean by "the people operating the computer"? If you mean the senior management in the post office then fine, yes, they should be held accountable. The people actually entering the information though had no choice or control at all. What happened was they entered all their transactions during the course of the day and then the system said they should have £N in the till, and in fact they had only £N - X in the till. The P.O. accused them of stealing the £X, and they had absolutely no way of demonstrating that they hadn't.

      What boggles the mind is that the software must have been developed by people who had absolutely no experience of accounting systems. It shouldn't be possible for massive discrepancies like this to creep in. Everything must add up. If money was apparently disappearing from the shops, then it should have been mysteriously accumulating somewhere else. Basic double-entry book keeping procedures would have prevented all of this.

      • it gets worse.

        Fujitsu "had the ability and facility to insert, inject, edit or delete transaction data or data in branch accounts, to implement fixes in Horizon that had the potential to affect transaction data or data in branch accounts or to rebuild branch transaction data, all without the knowledge or consent of the SPM [sub-postmaster] in question."

        If Fujitsu injected a transaction into a branch account, "this would look as though the SPM had done it."

        Almost no integrity of logs to further manipulation

    • You are one total and utter fool. The postmasters did nothing wrong. Their customers paid X pound, the postmaster put X pound in the till, and at the end of the day the blasted software said there should be 2X pound in the till, so they blamed those postmasters for theft.
    • by Cederic ( 9623 )

      If you use a computer accounting system to file your taxes, and the software is buggy, you can still be charged for filing a fraudulent return. The computer is merely a tool. The submitter of a tax return is ultimately liable for the accuracy of the return submitted.

      Which is what happened here. Postmaster submits return, gets prosecuted for fraud due to a discrepancy discovered at head office.

      The problem being of course that the Postmaster's return was accurate; the discrepancy was at head office due to their shitty IT system that they and Fujitsu lied about.

  • ...is enormous. Anyone who has worked on critical systems knows that the decisions they make can affect lives and there are not many checks on that power or oversight. Often one or two people are the core architects of the heart of systems and the only ones who really understand it. Simple things like deciding what fields should be in a database and what values are allowed can have repercussions for decades. Many times developers do not know what the best approach is and flip a coin (e.g., "is that a bu
    • The power of software developers...is enormous. Anyone who has worked on critical systems knows that the decisions they make can affect lives and there are not many checks on that power or oversight.

      Whew! Thank goodness open-source doesn't have that kind of power.

      • by rapjr ( 732628 )
        Open source does have that kind of power, and it's good that there is scrutiny going on there. I'm not sure a lot of people have examined open source software for bias though. They've looked for bugs and for security issues, but not so much for bias. OpenCV's default face recognition I know has been found to be biased. Outside of machine learning I'm not sure anyone has been looking too closely though. Linux has been primarily controlled by Linus, does it have any gender biases in it? Unix-like operat
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by rapjr ( 732628 )
        I agree, having qualified engineers building critical software systems would be ideal, but then we would also need standard reliable methods of building software, including security standards, which we do not currently seem to have. Best practices is not a standard, and every domain has its own special problems. A lot of software seems to be so complex and cobbled that we can not predict what it will do in new situations. For security and privacy it is not even clear that we understand them fully.
  • Twenty years? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @09:39PM (#61307472) Homepage

    They installed the software over twenty years ago and they are only now getting around to admitting it falsely accused people?

    In cases like this, I think there should be triple penalties.

    1) For falsely accusing someone and For false prosecution without proper investigation.
    2) For covering up the crime after any sane person would have discovered.
    3) For delaying restitution.

  • from the referenced article:
    "In December 2019, the Post Office agreed to pay almost £58m to settle the long-running dispute with more than 500 sub-postmasters and postmistresses affected by the scandal."

    This amounts to 160k USD per victim on average.

    160k USD as compensation for having your life destroyed???

  • This would never have happened in the USA, Canada or Germany. Every country has its own level of incompetence and even a little cronyism but the UK has significantly more cronyism and a level of arrogance that makes you sick when ever you are in standards meetings with them. My experience is with their banking sector where they knew full well that there was significantly more internal fraud than in other western countries. A combination of crony loyalty and we can't do it the same way as everyone else all
  • There are only a couple of companies that I won't flat out work for - Fujitsu is the most egregious of them. Remember the great Fujitsu hard drive debacles of the 2002 era? This was one reason and Horizons is another.

    Fujitsu have lied on the stand, have colluded with the Post Office to insert false accounts into the system (they had update access to other peoples accounts and were falsley inserting records at the Post Offices behest) They have perjured on the stand, they have conspired (and succeeded!) in p

  • My dad was a postmaster from the early 80s until recently. And one of the things I was told was that it was at their risk - like any business, any outstanding balances had to be covered them, so for example if at the end of the week they their books were out my £100, it came out of their pocket (though it didnâ(TM)t work if there was a surplus). I remember working for him in the post office before I went to uni, and was around when Horizon was implemented. Most of the postmasters, who were

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