Post Office scandal

it may be that they thought this magic software was doing the business and catching the so called dodgy ones out.
not everybody was accused though, so I wonder the reasons why some were singled out and others were not. whether it being the postmaster or an assistant.
as usual where money is concerned there will always be somebody tempted to slip a £20 in their pocket and it gets out of hand.
I am puzzled as to what made the money go missing, how was it shown to have been paid in and how did it disappear or was just that it just appeared to disappear.
As every case went through the courts and police, I can only think some rather big assumptions were made at some point.
was it a case a trial was heard and a judge ruled that the software could be trusted.
rather like the judge ruling that DNA could be used as evidence
Fujitsu consistently put up their own expert, who said that without a shadow of a doubt the software was fine.
Despite known bugs which caused the issues seen, being identified several years previously.
 


Fujitsu consistently put up their own expert, who said that without a shadow of a doubt the software was fine.
Despite known bugs which caused the issues seen, being identified several years previously.
was this done at every trial, or was the horizon system examined at a trial, which specifically examined Horizon and a judge gave a go ahead for it to be trusted.
 
was this done at every trial, or was the horizon system examined at a trial, which specifically examined Horizon and a judge gave a go ahead for it to be trusted.
The Fujitsu expert appeared at multiple trials across the country, and the 'weight of expert evidence' became one that the judges eventually went with - "well he was right in 10 other cases, so he must be right here"

There's a fuller timeline in ComputerWeekly who first raised it in 2009 - if you can scrool to the end you can see how it developed, the following article has a massive list of issues highlighted by that publication alone since 2009


Edit:
Seema Misra, the lady who went to jail while pregnant, had her lawyers questioning the computer system in November 2009 during her trial
A couple of examples of cases that went against people:
Lee Castleton, Bridlington, Yorkshire


Lee Castleton, 40, was postmaster at the Bridlington post office in east Yorkshire. His problems started in January 2004, and he claimed he couldn’t get help from the Post Office.

“Mis-balances continued for 12 weeks. I spent hours going through accounts, trying to find out what had happened. It was baffling,” he said.

Castleton rang the Horizon helpdesk, which is run by the Post Office, and asked repeatedly for help and a system check, but he said they did very little.

After 12 weeks, Castleton was suspended and the Post Office told him he had to pay for the losses. “I decided to contest my obligation to pay the money in the civil court, because I hadn’t done anything wrong,” he said.

Castleton could not afford lawyers in the High Court, or pay an IT expert witness to look at the system logs for him. He argued that the discrepancy in his accounts had been created by the computer. But the judge said that the deficiencies were real, not illusory, and, as such, were evidence that the branch had not been managed properly. “The losses must have been caused by his own error or that of his assistants,” the judgment said.

Under their contract with the Post Office, postmasters are liable for any losses that are due to carelessness, negligence or error. Castleton was also liable for the company’s legal costs.

“The Post Office really put me through the mangle,” he said. “I owed £27,000 for the deficits, and £321,000 altogether. I was in too deep – I see that now. The whole thing has been heartbreaking.”

Noel Thomas, Gaerwen, Anglesey


Noel Thomas, 61, from Anglesey, worked for the Post Office for 42 years. His problems started in 2003, when he discovered a deficit of £6,000. He said he spent hours looking at it, trying to find out what was wrong.

He said the Post Office paid half of the deficit for him, and he paid the other half. He didn’t have any more problems until 2004.

“It started up again all of a sudden. The money was going at a rate of £2,000 a month, and it went on until October 2005. The last figure they told me I owed was £50,000.

“The National Federation of Sub-Postmasters didn’t want to know. It is frustrating – I would like to know where that money went to. The whole thing is a real mess,” he said.

Faced with mounting deficits and nowhere to turn for help, Thomas signed the accounts to say the money was there, when it wasn’t. “I didn’t know what else to do. It was my biggest mistake – I should have turned round and told them I was shutting up shop until they found out what was going on. But at the time I thought they would close the Post Office if I did that, and that would cause a problem for the village.”

The Post Office prosecuted Thomas for false accounting. He pleaded guilty and said the IT system didn’t come up during his hearing – his barrister told the judge about his good character.

Mark Jenner, who at the time was the director of fraud investigation at accountancy firm Baker Tilly, said in a report prepared in advance of the case that he did not propose that the Horizon system was flawed. “If the Horizon system was flawed, I would expect to see issues raised by all 14,000 branches in the UK and not only a handful,” he said.

But Jenner had been unable to examine the computer terminal used in Thomas’s branch. “To completely discount the possibility that the Gaerwen branch terminal was not responsible for creating systematic and cumulative errors, I would still wish to inspect the terminal,” he said.

Jenner’s report was produced before the court hearing, when Thomas expected to face charges of theft. It was not used in the hearing because the theft charges were dropped.

Thomas was sentenced to 12 weeks in prison. “I spent my 60th birthday in there,” he said. “It was hell on earth and it took me a long time to get over it.”


Judge Fraser in his summing up in 2019, after which he referred teh whole matter to the Criminal Cases Review Commission

In his latest judgment, Fraser said the Post Office had exhibited “a simple institutional obstinacy or refusal to consider any possible alternatives to their view of Horizon, which was maintained regardless of the weight of factual evidence to the contrary”.

He added: “That approach by the Post Office was continued, even though now there is also considerable expert evidence to the contrary as well, and much of it agreed expert evidence on the existence of numerous bugs.

“This approach by the Post Office has amounted, in reality, to bare assertions and denials that ignore what has actually occurred, at least so far as the witnesses called before me in the Horizon issues trial are concerned. It amounts to the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the Earth is flat.”

Fraser said evidence of particular problems with Horizon, from claimant and defendant witnesses, had helped him to reach his conclusions. “I found some of the factual evidence to be of great assistance,” he said. “That of Mr Roll [former Fujitsu whistleblower] and Mr Godeseth [Fujitsu chief architect on the Post Office account] was extremely useful.

“The latter, one of the Post Office’s main witnesses, was sufficiently damaging to the Post Office’s case on the Horizon issues that they were, essentially, forced almost to disavow him, and the Post Office’s closing submissions were highly critical of the accuracy of his evidence.”
 
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glowing report from the guardian


the idea was good.

still cant see where the technology or reports from the technology were to be so trusted.

only problem with a machine thinking, is that it cannot be held accountable
 
I worked in RM when this started (and Horizon was launched). It was pretty obvious there was summat wrong from the outset. How could one organisation employ so many crooks, all without a blemish to their name previously?

Pretty shameful of the Post Office the way they've tried to bury it and didn't make any attempt to correct the software.
Look at the Commons for confirmation that it’s possible.
 
glowing report from the guardian


the idea was good.

still cant see where the technology or reports from the technology were to be so trusted.

only problem with a machine thinking, is that it cannot be held accountable
Oh it certainly transformed them all right

At some level there is someone who ultimately knew they were in the wrong but went ahead anyway.
Add in people giving evidence knowing they were in the wrong, the lawyers who decided to shred minutes/just stop documenting meetings after their own barrister said that they were withholding evidence from the defence.
 
Oh it certainly transformed them all right

At some level there is someone who ultimately knew they were in the wrong but went ahead anyway.
Add in people giving evidence knowing they were in the wrong, the lawyers who decided to shred minutes/just stop documenting meetings after their own barrister said that they were withholding evidence from the defence.
There has been a catalogue of lies told to the courts under oath and this should be investigated and the liars brought to justice.
At this point in time Our famous British Justice system is now the laughing stock of the world
 
Oh it certainly transformed them all right

At some level there is someone who ultimately knew they were in the wrong but went ahead anyway.
Add in people giving evidence knowing they were in the wrong, the lawyers who decided to shred minutes/just stop documenting meetings after their own barrister said that they were withholding evidence from the defence.

i forgot that the PO own their own investigation service and may even have their own legal teams, so that goes some way to explain why the legal teams did not question Horizon and its how trusty is it.

If it was the police presenting the evidence the CPS would query the accuracy of horizon.

Interesting to note that horizon needs to be in constant communication with the main frame and the reason for some being blamed and others not is with regards to the hardware in the post office being unreliable. is it common sense that when a machine is to record every transaction that communication needs to be good, if not the software in the post office will not be recording the same as in the main system computer

some postmasters were wrong in trying false accounting to hide a defect that was appearing, but what would self preservation bring to the table. some defence solicitors didnt do a very good job either and that includes the barristers.

gun to the head as well, with we will drop the theft if you plead guilty to false accounting.

nobody comes out of this cleanly shocking display by all parties
There has been a catalogue of lies told to the courts under oath and this should be investigated and the liars brought to justice.
At this point in time Our famous British Justice system is now the laughing stock of the world
it seems to be peacemeal as to how horizon was such trusted software.

Peil appears to be right in that it just gradually got accepted over a period of time.

definatley bugs in system but was (?) main issue bad communication between post office and main system. yet it never seems to have been tested to see the link of computers at post office and was it working correctly
 
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Heard a couple of them on the radio earlier, you could hear they were broken, lost their dignity, money, homes & marriages in some cases, an absolute disaster which someone must be held accountable for
 
Heard a couple of them on the radio earlier, you could hear they were broken, lost their dignity, money, homes & marriages in some cases, an absolute disaster which someone must be held accountable for
it is very sad, but I fear it is so complicated that many different branches of the system failed that will be difficult to apportion blame
 

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