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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I really hope some higher-ups at both the national postal service and Fujistu go to jail over this.

And how the hell did the post office come to believe 700+ sub-post-masters were committing fraud? It strikes me as patently ridiculous that such a large number of people would be doing similar small-time accounting fraud. Nobody thought "huh, might be the systems?"

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> Nobody thought "huh, might be the systems?"

The Post Office knew their system was broken from at least 2003. Their response was to bury the report and threaten the consultant.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974

Here, may it serve you well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_(novel)

A lot of people who aren't software developers have blind faith that software is always correct. Inversely, software developers never trust software to be correct.

In England and Wales, at least, there’s even a legal principle that information produced by software is correct unless it is proven otherwise. [0]

[0] https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/32105/

Sure, and once the cases made it to court, I can see jurors taking the software evidence at face value.

In this case, somebody should have pumped the brakes well before criminal proceedings. But, it seems like the higher-ups didn't want to look bad, so buried evidence and charged anyways, which should be criminal (no idea if it is, I'm no expert in UK law).

Yeah that genuinely boggles my mind about the whole thing. Less than 20 frauds I would say fine. 700+ is as you say patently ridiculous. It just is very obviously wrong and it’s very disheartening that noone in the senior management at the post office or fujitsu pumped the breaks at that point and tried to do a root cause analysis

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