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"!
1. A sign-off process where the customer approves releases.
2. A bug reporting process where the customer is informed of any defects in the software and whatever corrective steps are being/need to be taken in order to fix them.
Although I've seen quite a bit of evidence that the Horizon software was not fit for purpose, and it had serious bugs, I have not seen any evidence that Fujitsu hid that from the Post Office (evidence does seem exist that Fujitsu conspired with the Post Office to keep that evidence from judges in various trials).
It's not a crime to produce bad software (thank goodness), even under contract. Fujitsu should face consequences for lying to courts, but it seems to me that the lion's share of the criminality here is on the side of the Post Office, and they are doing a (relatively) good job of spreading blame to Fujitsu for the bugs in Horizon, where the real scandal is the dogged approach to prosecutions taken by the Post Office despite very significant problems with the evidence which were known to them.
I should have been more clear, apologies. Counting cash isn’t just “we have xxx cash monies”, it should include “and going by actual sales, and services processed, we should have xxx cash monies”. We both appear to agree that if you are going to take folks to court or tribunal or something, hell even “let’s have a trip to HR”, you best have some proper evidence besides “computer said so”.
> after a while surely alarm bells should have been going off somewhere.
I am absolutely certain that alarm bells were going off all over the place about this, but mostly in a “cover my ass and hope it goes away” mode.
_Lots_ of people belong in jail over this.
The people knowingly sending innocent people to prison, and responsible for the suicides of innocent people directly due to the pressure of being wrongly accused and the management knowing wrongly accused will never be held accountable and see any consequences of their actions.