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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

The Post Office were told about the problems in 2003 but decided to sack the contractor they had hired to check their software rather than deal with the problems.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974

Why aren't management in the dock over this.

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Fujitsu provided shoddy software that was inadequate for the job, then lied about it. The Post Office threw hundreds of subpostmasters under the bus, rather than admit the issues in the system. Senior management at both the Post Office and Fujitsu should be in the dock.

There has only been 1 Fujitsu whistleblower (as far I am aware). Surely hundreds of IT people must have known?

The mainstream print media mostly seem to have ignored this scandal, perferring instead to write about celebrity tittle tattle (with a few honourable exceptions, such as Computer Weekly and Private Eye).

This scandal has been known for years. But only the recent TV drama seems to have forced most politicians to care about it (with a few honourable exceptions, such as Lord Arbuthnot).

While it is fair to say "Fujitsu," a more complete picture is a British company called International Computers Limited (ICL) acquired by Fujitsu after the Post Office job started. ICL seems like a British variant of IBM.

The Horizon accounting system was developed by ICL Pathway, owned by the Japanese company Fujitsu. [0]

International Computers Limited (ICL) was a British computer hardware, computer software and computer services company that operated from 1968 until 2002. [1]

In May 1996, ICL Pathway Limited (later Fujitsu Services (Pathway) Limited) was awarded the private finance initiative contract to develop the Horizon IT system to modernize Post Office and Benefits Agency operations. [1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limite...

The reference from that first wikipedia article, here: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c..., dated 1996, states on the final page that the ultimate controller of ICL Pathway (who developed Horizon) was, at this time (1996), indeed Fujitsu.

It wasn't like Fujitsu had bought the company and inherited the liability - they had in fact themselves bid for and won the project - via these intermediaries.

There have been literally hundreds of articles about this in the mainstream media for well over a decade. Yes, Computer Weekly and Private Eye deserve the biggest share of credit for persuing it, but it's simply not true to sat that the rest of media has ignored it. The real scandal is that even though it was widely reported, so little was done about it for years.

One upshot of the current UK government being in such dire straits in terms of their popularity, and this scandal causing such a universal uproar in public opinion, is that they do seem to be bending to it and actually doing something. Enough? Probably not.

I would be interested to know the number of articles published on the scandal by mainstream papers, such as the independent, Guardian, Times and Telegraph.

A quick search for ["post office" horizon] on The Times showed >700 articles. The Guardian and Independent both use Google, which show an improbable tens of thousands of results, but I'd imagine it's still similar to The Times.

Randomly selecting 2022, The Times seems to have published 5 articles substantially about the Horizons system. Its not nothing, but it is hardly a flood.

The function of the mainstream media (particularly in the UK) is not to inform the public but to keep them in line. It's worth remembering that Rupert Murdoch owns 4 newspapers and a TV channel.

Murdoch has possibly done more damage to the UK than any other human being alive.

They are paying out roughly 150k per prosecution. That seems low if most of those resulted in fines and jail time. Does anyone have a source for data on the outcomes of these cases?

(If pressed on “seems low” I couldn’t exactly say, but if ten million is the actuarial value of life then every year of adult life in prison should be worth at least 175k, on top of the difficulties of enduring prosecution and career and reputation being harmed.)

Andrew Malkinson was wrongly convicted and spent 17 years in a UK jail. He is likely to eventually get less than £1M compensation and that's after the government scraped the rule that "board and lodge" would be subtracted from the compensation.

edit: accidentally a word.

17 years (missing a word.) Link for those unfamiliar like me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_conviction_of_Andrew_...

That seems grossly unfair. Based on what I'm musing, at bare minimum, 3 million would be appropriate.

What's a good rationale for any particular sum?

I mean, for starters you can just calculate average lifetime earnings and subtract expected earnings of the person over the remainder of their lifespan, then add an amount per year in prison roughly corresponding to the QALY value of prison vs normal life...

But is there anything else you might add on? I expect the above calculation to only arrive at about a million for a country like the UK (which is less rich than the US and has less bad prisons).

> I mean, for starters you can just calculate average lifetime earnings and subtract expected earnings of the person over the remainder of their lifespan, then add an amount per year in prison roughly corresponding to the QALY value of prison vs normal life...

I would at least double, or triple it. He lost his life outside his work and earnings. He wasn't in prison for only 8h/day.

That's what the QALY cost would be about.

You probably don't want to give out much more than the cost of a QALY in your health system...

Needs a compound annual growth rate, plus there's lost opportunity costs.

It's an immediate 150k payment, followed by a further settlement figure. I think that's a choice between either 600k without question, or an investigation to assess actual loss.

> or an investigation to assess actual loss.

Which sounds like a poor taste joke given what led to this (poor investigation or lack thereof)

It is often trying to find any ways to pinch pennies, indeed.

A recent case made the news and prompted a change of the rules [1]. Until last year they deducted "living costs" from compensation for wrongful imprisonment because while a person is in jail they don't have to pay for food and housing, thereby saving money...

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66417103

That's why there is an option of a no investigation settlement. But if that were the only option, postmasters who felt that it didn't compensate them adequately would have reason to complain.

The problem with modern management is that they are rarely accountable to those that have been wronged. Rather, they are accountable to their bosses. And the are fine as long as they are sycophantic bootlickers.

From TFA:

"The Post Office said the honour was given for [Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells'] work on "diversity and inclusion", and her "commitment to the social purpose at the heart of the business and her dedication in putting the customer first".

Gross negligence. Claw back their wages to compensate the postmasters.

Not even close. They conspired to cover up deficiencies while people were being criminally prosecuted for the discrepancies caused by those deficiencies. The knew about it and they belong in jail. Nothing less.

Yes, they deserve the jail time they so effortlessly dolled out to the innocent people.

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