A miscarriage of justice

Most people in the UK will have heard about the Post Office scandal but for those who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a summary.

The Post Office rolled out a new computer system across the UK in 1999 to help subpostmasters manage their books. It was created by Fujitsu and contained a bug that created duplicate transactions causing a discrepancy between the amount in the till and the amount the computer said they should have. This led to the prosecution of over 900 subpostmasters for theft, false accounting, and fraud. Many went to jail including a pregnant mother. Four committed suicide. They lost tens of thousands of pounds, their jobs, their homes, their reputations, their livelihoods and for those who ended up with criminal convictions, their future earning capacity.

The Post Office continued to prosecute individuals up to 2015 despite repeated reports of bugs in the software. They missed several opportunities to put things right and only now, more than two decades later, are the subpostmasters having their names cleared and starting to get compensation. Some have died of old age before seeing their convictions overturned. It is a terrifying travesty of justice. The sort of thing you might see in a movie as a work of fiction but it’s a true story and it happened in the UK. That is what makes it so terrifying. It could have happened to any of us.

Although court cases have been going on for years now and the first news report that I’m aware of dates back to 2009 in Computer Weekly, it’s topical because ITV have just released a series about it. You can view the trailer below:

One man who tried to fight them in court lost and had to pay the Post Office’s legal expenses of £321,000. He filed for bankruptcy.

In 2006 one particularly savvy subpostmaster who’d recently graduated from a degree in computer science ran two software systems in parallel and discovered the Horizon system created by Fujitsu was generating duplicate transactions. He could reproduce the problem and reported it to the Post Office who referred it to Fujitsu.

It’s difficult for me to understand why nothing was done following this report by either Fujitsu or the Post Office. I worked in support for a software company for many years and indeed I still work for a software company but now in product; when a user hands you a reproducible bug report you fix it. Much harder are the vague bug reports like “it doesn’t work”. Even those you don’t ignore but in this case it was handed to them with ice-cream and strawberries on a silver platter.

What were they thinking?

I guess once they’d commenced ruining innocent people’s lives they couldn’t turn back without admitting what they’d done and so instead doubled-down on denial and prosecution. Someone, maybe several people, need to be held accountable for this. So far not single person has been sacked or charged with anything at all while many subpostmasters are still waiting for compensation, their lives in limbo. The CEO of the Post Office from 2012 – 2019 even got a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for her services to the Post Office. What a kick in the guts that must be to all those victims of the Post Office. And Fujitsu have had no repercussions whatsoever for their role despite the leak of an internal report that recommended a complete rewrite of the Horizon software code just as the British government was rolling it out to post offices. They didn’t rewrite the code and they didn’t disclose the problems with it.

Computer code contains bugs. It’s written by humans and humans make mistakes. I truly wonder about the computer literacy of management at the Post Office for them to put so much trust in a software program at the expense of people’s lives. I am reminded of a Bertrand Russell quote, “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.” They were literally prepared to let others die for their unfounded trust in accounting software. But how also were so many convicted without any evidence? Surely if someone had stolen tens of thousands of pounds there’d be evidence of that like a new shiny car, an overseas holiday or some sudden appearance of funds in their bank accounts. But there was no evidence because they hadn’t stolen any money. Indeed the only theft was by the Post Office stealing money from innocent subpostmasters. A novel business strategy for sure but not a legal, ethical, or sustainable one.