Fujitsu will not bid for UK.gov business until Post Office inquiry closes

While the software was definitively not up to snuff, it sounds like the post office bears significantly more responsibility as the ones who went out of their way to prosecute.

Some catch up reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39062150

In a few lines, there is everything:

  - Developers lying 
  - Managers lying 
  - Lawyers hiding and editing evidence
  - Victims made bankrupt, at least 4 suicides
  - Due to UK law the post office was also the prosecutor

If it sounds horrible, its because it's even worst.

That’s not what it sounds like even at a trivial level. It has been obvious (since like 2009, in public journalism) that Fujitsu’s impact is more than just incompetence.

They made an accounting software that couldn't add numbers correctly and destroyed many lifes on the way.

Sure, others had many off-ramps — but it started with bad software and people not caring to fix it.

You have all the names being identified here, with all emails and documentation being shown. It is simply unbelievable, the collective amnesia that comes up, when you show to somebody the email, where they recommended to hide evidence...

https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947

Based on my experience of consulting with public sector, most projects “fail” in one way or another.

Gov departments are notorious for not giving correct requirements, changing requirements or swamping the project in bureaucracy.

If we said firms couldn’t rebid after a failed project (without the cool off) I suspect there wouldn’t be many firms left.

It shouldn’t be this way but unfortunately it is.

Doesn't seem a big deal that they aren't forbidden from bidding. It's the government that should be prevented from choosing them, if anything.

Questionable how enforcable a bidding-ban could be, given how trivial it presumably is to bid through a proxy/subsidiary entity.

The Horizon project didn't fail — the customer was happy and signed off on the successful delivery. The customer even insisted that all was well for decades after that. Quite clearly there was no failure and no reason for any cooling-off period.

RAA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum if you want.

I'd go farther and say they should end up like Takata. They were fined 250% of their annual EBIT, and the whole company went under from the fines alone.

Paula Vennells should be in a prison cell. A thoroughly nasty piece of work she is.

You're right that Fujitsu shouldn't be made fall guy - although they should face massive fines, the Post Office management actually knew the software was buggy and witness statements from Fujitsu developers admitting to the bugs existing were altered by Post Office lawyers to remove references to those bugs (!). That is scandalous and people really need to go to jail over such a miscarriage of justice.

It wasn't so much a matter of "not counting cash" though - it was counted frequently, and the problem was that when it was counted, bugs in the accounting system had accumulated to make it look like there was cash missing. These errors added up to a lot of money that never existed seemingly being missing.

The crazy thing to me is how so many people (nine hundred!) could be prosecuted for exactly the same thing, with none of them having any seemingly unexplained wealth, suspicious transactions, money trail, or anything like that at all... I mean, sure, for the first few you might just think they were smart in hiding it, but even before they knew about the bugs and covered that up (and fraudulently kept prosecuting people), after a while surely alarm bells should have been going off somewhere. These were large sums of money, somebody should have stopped and asked "is the most likely scenario for this that we keep employing dozens and dozens of masterful money laundering thieves as postmasters and sub-postmasters, or is something else going wrong"!