Ask HN: Please share your country's public software scandals
Seems every country has its software scandals funded by the public over the tax. Share pls.
This is not a real scandal because software scandals are not as important as the war which is going on right now. But this definitely begs a scandal: every businessman of Ukraine must install a non-free software (there are few tens of options but none of them is an open-source software) for the sake of registering every single sell. Interesting part of the story is that Russia uses to bomb Ukraine's electricity and connection objects which allows any businessman to be super easily fined by 300% of all non-registered goods which were sold.
In other words, what Ukraine govt does to businesses which are out of electricity and connection? It requires all of them to have a computer and networking.
Except as it turns out, people were innocent, and the software was flawed. This was known by the Post Office for years, but covered up. After years of investigation reports, court cases and now an inquiry, it's only recently received widespread media attention, and some of the people involved are starting to receive compensation.
It's one of the biggest miscarriages of justice ever to have happened in the UK, and no one involved in the false prosecutions or coverup has been charged.
All property owners in Denmark will receive new public property assessments based on a new and more reliable assessment system.
That's the selling point.
Reality is that with the roll out of the new system many thousand people's houses has either increased or decreased massively in value.
A house that was worth 1.000.000DKK might now have been publicly valued to 25.000.000DKK.
Cost of the new system is beyond 1bn dollars and has been going on since 2014.
An illegal scheme concoted by the previous government to try an algorithmically detect welfare fraud. The system falsley flagged over 400,000 cases. Some people ended up killing themselves as a result of these false accusations. The government had to pay over a billion dollars in reparations to victims of the scheme.