An empowered technical architecture function could have vetted this system and prevented this all. But gut it and stamp it under the heal of the CFO and you may as well not bother.
A lot of what seems apparent in this case is that contractual and commercial factors weren't set up correctly - they were set up to deliver predictable prices (loved by public sector clients), but not necessarily to deliver good outcomes.
An example - it appeared much of the rush to ship the point of sale terminals was to get through customer acceptance (and presumably the payment milestone), despite scope creep and quality issues. And there was a cost for PO to access audit logs, and limits on capacity of these logs which could be handled. Presumably this delivered a lower headline price for an accountant negotiating the price down, but it ultimately made a poorer solution that wasn't for for purpose.
It seems like (from what I've seen of the evidence) nobody internally in PO really had full understanding and ownership of the project and they'd outsourced that (but kept the suppliers tightly commercially managed, creating the incentives for shipping poor quality code, rather than spending the time to polish it, as some had tried to do in the development team).
Some interesting evidence here in the inquiry on software development practices and low competency and quality of code - https://postofficeinquiry.dracos.co.uk/phase-2/2022-11-16/#d...
Interesting link, thanks.
This is very much the standard in UK public procurement and has been for a large number of years. It's got a lot worse since Brexit when most civil servants with any skills or capability to deliver have moved on because they didn't want to deliver the 'will of the people' to have their cake and eat it.
And they also bought far too much. Germany is now required by the EU treaties to buy so much vaccine supply that if it didn't expire it would last them until the 24th century.
After all that, there was an attempt at an investigation but it turned out the whole thing was negotiated in secret and key deals were made by Ursula von der Leyen using deleted SMS messages.
This is completely different from the British system, where key deals are made in secret using deleted Whatsapp messages.