>Emma Price, counsel to the inquiry, asked Barnes if that problem was a “missed opportunity to address deficient coding practices that led to [other] silent failures”, which resulted in subpostmasters being wrongfully prosecuted.
>In an internal message chain at the time, Barnes said: “I hope the [Horizon Online] version is much better.”
>“We were just about to replace [legacy] Horizon with HNGx [Horizon Online],” said Barnes at the inquiry. “The better thing to do is to make sure the [Horizon Online] software works. It would have just been too expensive to do a thorough job at that stage. It would have been uneconomic. To comprehensively rewrite the error handling would be a massive job. It would be extremely expensive.”
>In 2009, Barnes moved to work with the audit team, which became responsible for pulling data together on post office operators subsequently used in trials.
>Around that time, Fujitsu scrapped using a third-party software program that had been in place to, among other tasks, help produce these audit record queries (ARQs).
>Fujitsu internally rewrote the code so that Horizon would handle the tasks, but glitches later appeared that meant the ARQs did not provide complete information, something the company was aware could undermine prosecutions if exposed.
>“To save [paying] the licence fee, they wanted to get rid of [the third-party supplier],” said Barnes on Wednesday
This is fairly damning sequence. Not only did they sweep the problem under the carpet they also got rid of the broom to save a few quid. ICL was always a bit flakey – looks like Fujitsu bought the culture along with the rest of it.
In other words, in an effort to save money, they condemned innocent people to prison, caused suicides and ruined entire lives over money which it now seems went to the people pursuing the prosecutions in the first place, all in an effort to save a bit of cash. Somebody DOES need to go to prison over this, for a very long time.
Just so everyone’s clear, a “bug” is a fault or error in the design/build, not something that has come into the system randomly to ruin everyone’s day. This was a shit product not fit for purpose, with PO senior management practically complicit covering up the procurement of said shit product.
It must look positively dirt cheap compared to what they will end up paying now
What i still dont understand is if around 750 sub postmasters were flagged as thefts, would this not seem awfully high and need someone to check it was correct or not? How did so many convictions pass despite protests from the accused and it still wasnt investigated?
This is a lazy evasion, and I speak as a software developer.
Too costly ? So fuck a load of people’s lives up. So much cheaper. FFS.
So let me get this clear: Senior staff at the Post Office decided that they should **allow unjust prosecutions of their sub-postmaster franchisees** because it would cost them too much money; the flaws in the software derived from another of their cost-cutting exercises, wherein **they got rid of reliable software to save on paying licence fees**; and now **HMRC may well bankrupt the Post Office** because the management decided to save money by incorrectly treating the compensation payments that they’ve had to make to sub-postmasters as tax-deductible.
There’s a phrase for this: “*Penny wise, and pound foolish*”.
Well, I think they are quite close to finding out that it is going to turn out not to have been the cheapest option at all.
This scheme both used and consolidated a coverup scheme. It was devised by lawyers and is apparently considered complicated.
As a lawyer I don’t personally find it complicated. It is pretty evil though.
To be fair, the Guardian are missing off the second half of that statement which is words to the effect of “so we were in the process of replacing it with a better one” which seems a lot more reasonable.
I’d be interested to know if there was any sort of service auditor report for Horizon or if EY just relied on their own testing entirely? There was clearly a perverse incentive on the fraud team to argue this was all fraud rather than error.
The people who chose their wallets over lives have got to serve time in prison. It is the only way executive level workers will ever start to learn.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside.
Now, should we initiate a recall?
Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.
Reminds me of the car recall calculation in Fight Club. Scary stuff.
People who were involved in this cover up need to go to prison.
Too costly for Fujitsu, as far as I can tell from the article. Hopefully not for the Post Office, who should have been able to insist that their subcontractor fixed the quality of their own product. I hope.
So why did the Post Office end up accepting this and then covering it up? This part doesn’t make sense to me.
As someone with lots of experience creating and managing software this makes me nervous. The post office didn’t do good testing or auditing of the software when they got it, they seem to have offloaded way too much responsibility off to external vendors. What worries me even more is that other systems that the post office uses didn’t spot any problems with the supposed missing moneys. It is even worse that so many knew about the problems and the post office thought it would never get out. It is no wonder fujitsu ran rings around them, I am still shocked over how bad the processes in the post office are.
17 comments
>Emma Price, counsel to the inquiry, asked Barnes if that problem was a “missed opportunity to address deficient coding practices that led to [other] silent failures”, which resulted in subpostmasters being wrongfully prosecuted.
>In an internal message chain at the time, Barnes said: “I hope the [Horizon Online] version is much better.”
>“We were just about to replace [legacy] Horizon with HNGx [Horizon Online],” said Barnes at the inquiry. “The better thing to do is to make sure the [Horizon Online] software works. It would have just been too expensive to do a thorough job at that stage. It would have been uneconomic. To comprehensively rewrite the error handling would be a massive job. It would be extremely expensive.”
>In 2009, Barnes moved to work with the audit team, which became responsible for pulling data together on post office operators subsequently used in trials.
>Around that time, Fujitsu scrapped using a third-party software program that had been in place to, among other tasks, help produce these audit record queries (ARQs).
>Fujitsu internally rewrote the code so that Horizon would handle the tasks, but glitches later appeared that meant the ARQs did not provide complete information, something the company was aware could undermine prosecutions if exposed.
>“To save [paying] the licence fee, they wanted to get rid of [the third-party supplier],” said Barnes on Wednesday
This is fairly damning sequence. Not only did they sweep the problem under the carpet they also got rid of the broom to save a few quid. ICL was always a bit flakey – looks like Fujitsu bought the culture along with the rest of it.
In other words, in an effort to save money, they condemned innocent people to prison, caused suicides and ruined entire lives over money which it now seems went to the people pursuing the prosecutions in the first place, all in an effort to save a bit of cash. Somebody DOES need to go to prison over this, for a very long time.
Just so everyone’s clear, a “bug” is a fault or error in the design/build, not something that has come into the system randomly to ruin everyone’s day. This was a shit product not fit for purpose, with PO senior management practically complicit covering up the procurement of said shit product.
It must look positively dirt cheap compared to what they will end up paying now
What i still dont understand is if around 750 sub postmasters were flagged as thefts, would this not seem awfully high and need someone to check it was correct or not? How did so many convictions pass despite protests from the accused and it still wasnt investigated?
This is a lazy evasion, and I speak as a software developer.
Too costly ? So fuck a load of people’s lives up. So much cheaper. FFS.
So let me get this clear: Senior staff at the Post Office decided that they should **allow unjust prosecutions of their sub-postmaster franchisees** because it would cost them too much money; the flaws in the software derived from another of their cost-cutting exercises, wherein **they got rid of reliable software to save on paying licence fees**; and now **HMRC may well bankrupt the Post Office** because the management decided to save money by incorrectly treating the compensation payments that they’ve had to make to sub-postmasters as tax-deductible.
There’s a phrase for this: “*Penny wise, and pound foolish*”.
Well, I think they are quite close to finding out that it is going to turn out not to have been the cheapest option at all.
This scheme both used and consolidated a coverup scheme. It was devised by lawyers and is apparently considered complicated.
As a lawyer I don’t personally find it complicated. It is pretty evil though.
To be fair, the Guardian are missing off the second half of that statement which is words to the effect of “so we were in the process of replacing it with a better one” which seems a lot more reasonable.
I’d be interested to know if there was any sort of service auditor report for Horizon or if EY just relied on their own testing entirely? There was clearly a perverse incentive on the fraud team to argue this was all fraud rather than error.
The people who chose their wallets over lives have got to serve time in prison. It is the only way executive level workers will ever start to learn.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside.
Now, should we initiate a recall?
Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.
Reminds me of the car recall calculation in Fight Club. Scary stuff.
People who were involved in this cover up need to go to prison.
Too costly for Fujitsu, as far as I can tell from the article. Hopefully not for the Post Office, who should have been able to insist that their subcontractor fixed the quality of their own product. I hope.
So why did the Post Office end up accepting this and then covering it up? This part doesn’t make sense to me.
As someone with lots of experience creating and managing software this makes me nervous. The post office didn’t do good testing or auditing of the software when they got it, they seem to have offloaded way too much responsibility off to external vendors. What worries me even more is that other systems that the post office uses didn’t spot any problems with the supposed missing moneys. It is even worse that so many knew about the problems and the post office thought it would never get out. It is no wonder fujitsu ran rings around them, I am still shocked over how bad the processes in the post office are.