I’ve read articles about this whole mess, and I’m glad they’re getting some justice, even if it’s far too late for those who have taken their own lives due to being wrongfully accused.
I wonder if the Post Office will continue to stubbornly insist that it stands by the prosecutions.
So, did Fujitsu actually steal a ton of money? It’s not clear in the article.
I am a bookkeeper and would be interested in learning more about how this actually worked. It seems astounding to have such a large number of prosecutions of this particular position.
I think that was part of the problem- the scale of the “theft” and the fact that they’d already sunk so much money into the system.
Nobody stole any money. Or at least, there was not widespread theft as suggested by the prosecutions.
The TLDR version is that Fujitsu was contracted to create and implement a sale and accounting system, it sucked, and hundreds of people were improperly accused and convicted of theft when the bad system incorrectly reported financial shortfalls.
Some of them were ruined. Some committed suicide. It’s been years and years, and they’re only now getting a promise of justice.
It’s a huge scandal, labeled by some the worst miscarriage of justice in modern British history.
Ok, thanks. What a nightmare.
Fujitsu no, the Post Office yes.
Broadly (better informed Dopers are welcome to correct): the Post Office contracts with self-employed sub-Postmasters to run the local Post Office branches where people come to transact the retail business of the Post Office - mostly sending packages and buying stamps, but also some banking services, paying bills to other orgs, renewing driving licences etc. It is - or was when this scandal began c.25 years ago - a business that involved handling and accounting for a lot of cash.
Because the PO is a fairly old institution that is somewhat bound up with government, and because it is vastly more powerful than any individual wannabe sub-Postmaster, its contracts -which involved sub-PMs investing substantial sums up-front for the right to run the business - had been basically unchanged for decades and included clauses that meant that sub-Postmasters were on the hook for any discrepancies between the accounts and actual cash on hand.
In partnership with Fujitsu, the Post Office rolled out a new accounting system that (long story short) was completely unfit for purpose. The two main problems were: it wasn’t accurate; it allowed users other than the sub-Postmaster to remotely edit the accounts. As a result, discrepancies rapidly began to appear between the actual cash in the safe and what the system said should be there.
At a time of huge stress, the sub-postmasters’ legitimate options were either to accept the shortfall, making it their personal liability, or to refuse to sign off the accounts as correct. The former could mean an imminent date in the bankruptcy court; the latter prevented the Horizon system rolling over to the next day, shutting their branch and putting them in breach of contract. For many, either choice spelt ruin
This was all exacerbated by the way the PO dealt with people raising concerns: the helpline for Horizon told hundreds of sub-PMs that they were the only individual to raise any issues, so it couldn’t be the system; the investigators treated everybody like a thief; most damningly of all the PO went ahead with prosecutions which we now know they knew they had no grounds for.
Instead, she was charged with false accounting and theft – despite Post Office investigation documents which later came to light stating: “There is no evidence of theft.”
They did extract a lot of money from sub-PMs. If that money really had been taken, then this would simply be restitution - as no actual money was missing, these “repayments” were pure profit for the PO,
The thieves were the Post Office, in fact.
Quotes taken from this very readable report, which will likely have you kicking the furniture and muttering “How fucking dare they”
You are correct. I retract my statement that there was no meaningful theft. Your angle is the right way to view this.
In all the coverage, I’ve still never seen any clear explanation of what happened to all the money “recovered” from people. Did it just go into a general slush fund, or what?
Well, PO execs were earning trousering huge bonuses for
reducing “losses” which would account for some of it.
I think that the POs position would have been that this was essentially income from the local post-offices - that it was rightfully earned retail revenue which they had recovered. So presumably it would have been treated like regular income, I guess. But of course it’s not real income, there were never actual transactions behind it, so there’s no cost-of-sales related outgoings, it’s just a transfer of money from the sub-PM to the PO, which makes it pure profit. As @pjd says, that profitability translated into lots of “aren’t we clever boys and girls” payments to the senior execs.
I came across a video describing the technical failures in some detail.
“Take money out of one account and put it into another account in the face of fallible operations” is a textbook example (and initial-phone-screen level interview question) for concurrency and robust transaction handling, and it sounds like the implemented system failed at that pretty spectacularly. The dev team was small and had a range of ability levels, and was not up to the task of making a proper distributed application.
I would think that the victims of this would be at least as interested in reimbursement as in being cleared of a nonexistent crime. These were never rich people, and they (or their descendants) were apparently all made significantly more poor by what happened. Is there anything in the offing about that? Can they sue Fujitsu or the PO, or both?
Compensation is another saga.
In principle, there are hundreds of sub-PMs whose right to compensation is recognised by the Post Office.
In practice, the process of giving to them is proceeding at a pace that makes glaciers look pacy. There is an enormously complex form, designed to make it easy to fail to claim for anything (e.g stress, loss of reputation, legal costs, any other damages) other than simple financial restitution. Even if you navigate that, it then takes seemingly forever for the correct level of compensation to be calculated. Whatever you are offered, you then have to decide to accept what will be a low offer or spend further time and money appealing.
The government is slowly intervening , and apparently is attempting to set up a fast track scheme. I say apparently because there has been a recent scandal to the effect that the government ordered the recently appointed and more recently fired Chair of the Post Office to go slow on making payments. Government denied this, but the Chair has produced a contemporary note of a meeting which reflects his story.
Basically, at every stage of this story, the people with power seem to have asked themselves “Are we going to do the right thing, or are we going to fuck these people over some more” and come up with the wrong but profitable answer.
It is worse than that. The errors were counted as pure profit, certainly - but the Post Office also attempted to recover the ‘losses’ from the sub-postmasters - and sometimes they succeeded, so the Post Office were in effect paid twice.
In a country with a codified constitution, the govt’s solution of simply overriding the verdicts of the courts would probably be illegal.
I understand that to be a sticking point under the UK “conventional” constitution, too. The courts should be the entity giving relief, and the government should keep their nose out of it. But the courts are known to be slow, and it’s become a bit of a poiltical situation.
Complicated here by the fact that the government is also the sole shareholder of the Post Office, and as such presumably can give direction to the board in a fairly convincing way outwith the legal/administrative governmental framework.
For anyone who would like an all-in-one summary of the scandal, I have just read and can recommend the article above.
I’ve been reading the coverage in dribs and drabs over time (which really picked up with the ITV miniseries), so there weren’t any real surprises, but if you haven’t been following along and want a soup-to-nuts rundown on this catastrophic miscarriage of justice and technology mismanagement, I heartily recommend you set aside 20 minutes, grab a cup of coffee (or, perhaps more appropriately, tea), and click.
By the end, you will want more than for the falsely accused sub-postmasters to have their records cleared and their money returned. You will be furious, and you will know the names of at least half a dozen people who should go to fucking jail, chiefly the Post Office prosecutors who knowingly lied in court proceedings in order to secure the convictions of innocent people.
I for one am impressed with the number of circumlocutions British judges have at hand to say You, sir, have been lying through your teeth.