There definitely needs to be some heads rolling for perverting the course of justice if nothing else. I'm surprised that the court system is happy with the Post Office using them as their attack dogs.
Why specifically them? Because both gave evidence in Post Office prosecutions of SPMs that Horizon did not have flaws, then in the Bates v Post Office Ltd case, their support ticket logs (PEAKs) were finally included in evidence. These work tickets show both of them acknowledging bugs that create false accounts, and manually correcting data in the records and audit logs to balance it out... and also sometimes getting the "fix" wrong without noticing... and noting that they saw no need to inform the SPMs.
https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html
The very things SPMs said were happening and the Post Office and Fujitsu denied. They fucking knew it. They testified that the things they did day-in, day-out never happened, and SPMs were convicted and sometimes imprisoned as a result.
Obviously there are a lot more people at both Fujitsu and the Post Office that need to see justice, but this is a start.
> The Postmaster reported that the problem at his one specific site had been been happening intermittently all year. He told NBSC who sent experienced trainers out to ensure the Subpostmaster wasn’t doing something wrong. The trainers concluded the Subpostmaster was doing nothing wrong and witnessed the error happening. The auditors, who were incentivised by the Post Office to suspend Subpostmasters with discrepancies (another story), came out. They concluded the Subpostmaster was doing nothing wrong and they witnessed the error happening.
> Chambers went to work. She delved into the system and reported: “have checked the system figures… and can confirm that all the variants reported since then have been calculated correctly. There are no known issues that would result in the variance being incorrect.”
> Chambers closed the ticket with a definitive: “No fault in product”.
> The cause of the defect was assigned to “User” – that is, the Subpostmaster.
> When Beer asked why, Chambers replied: “Because I was rather frustrated by not – by feeling that I couldn’t fully get to the bottom of it. But there was no evidence for it being a system error.”
...
> Chambers conceded: “something was obviously wrong, in that the branch obviously were getting these discrepancies that they weren’t expecting, but all I could see on my side was that they were apparently declaring these differing amounts, and I certainly didn’t know of any system errors that would cause that to happen, or that would take what they were declaring and not record it correctly…. so I felt, on balance, there was just no evidence of a system error.”
> No evidence. Williams pointed out that it surely was unlikely to be a user error if both trainers and auditors had recorded the Subpostmaster as inputting information correctly. Chambers replied:
> “Well, yeah, I… yes, I don’t know why… I’m not happy with this one. But I still stand by there being no indication of a system error and the numbers that they were recording just didn’t make a lot of sense.”
Print-outs of the support system tickets are shown in the inquiry [1] (e.g. the ones with former technical support engineers). For instance, there is one from October/November 1999 with conversation history of people from different levels of support, where you can see they (the support and software engineers) knew the exact amount of money missing and that the caller was "very agitated as he keeps having problems with the system when balancing. He thinks it is a system problem".
I haven't seen support system tickets where they stated the discrepancies were caused by Horizon in the inquiry (obviously in court they proved there actually were), but I only watched a few hours of this so far. And the support engineers stated they did not grasp the implications of the callers having discrepancies.
The support engineers even visited the callers on-site.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947/video...