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From the post office to prison: how a bug in the Horizon program ruined the lives of thousands of Britons
In recent years, everyone has become accustomed to news about IT problems in large businesses, many have encountered them themselves. Someone found their data leaked from the delivery service, someone could not receive a parcel due to a ransomware attack on the logistics operator, and someone did not order a train ticket in time due to a dead application of a state corporation. All these incidents hit emotions, but had no serious consequences. So it seems like this is usually the case.
However, malfunctions in the state corporation's computer system can turn the lives of many people into a real dystopian plot. As it already happened in the story with the British post office and the Horizon software from the Japanese company Fujitsu: thousands of ruined reputations, 700 convictions, and 236 people mistakenly sent to prison. Not to mention several suicides…
Not a single city's story
At the end of the last century, it was common practice in the UK for individuals to open post offices in their shops. In those years, such establishments easily became the "hearts" of villages or small towns, acting as something like clubs where you could communicate with fellow villagers, learn local news, organize cultural events, interact with officials, etc.
It is logical that the owners of such shops were public and respected people in their settlements, who were often approached for help on various issues. More than 12 thousand of these "village elders" have tied themselves to the state corporation Post Office by a contract, under which they were obliged to provide postal services to citizens, transferring the revenue to the company.
The rapid growth of the network of postal branches at private shops was facilitated by the active digitalization of the British post, simplifying any accounting. Thus, back in the mid-90s, "Post of Britain" announced a tender for the implementation of accounting software, which was won by International Computers Limited (ICL), absorbed by the giant Fujitsu. It is she who owns the authorship of the Horizon software, the version of which Legacy Horizon IT System ("LHITS") later gained a sad notoriety.
The corporation is very angry
At first, everything went fine, but already in 1999 Legacy Horizon began to overstate the amounts in the reports that were in the cash registers of postal branches. Although the discrepancies quickly became widespread and continued to grow, it was easier to explain the shortage by the good old human factor. The management of "Post of Britain" did not want to listen to the worried postmasters, referring to the experience of branches where the accounting program successfully disguised itself as unbugged.
So, Jason Coyne from Best Practice Group, appointed by the court as an independent expert in the dispute between the corporation and Julia Walstenholm from the post office in Cleveleys, Lancashire, in 2003 analyzed the support call log. He concluded that at least 63 calls were related to Horizon technical issues and only 13 were about working with its interface. In his report, he unequivocally stated the malfunction of the equipment or software, adding that Fujitsu and/or the Post Office for some reason refuse to analyze and solve the problem on their side.
Meanwhile, British government corporations at that time had the now revised right to independently initiate criminal cases. Over several years, the "Post Office" in semi-automatic mode brought charges against 3500 post office owners, which became almost a civil execution for honest postmasters, and often drove them into very serious debts. Suspected of robbing their neighbors, many of these people went bankrupt, were forced to leave their homes.
In addition to a ruined reputation and a debt hole, there were much more serious consequences: as mentioned above, several hundred people went to jail, and four even committed suicide - some could not bear the shame, and some "lost" one hundred thousand pounds sterling.
Who is Alan Bates?
Like many other victims of this story, for Alan Bates, a former deputy postmaster, it all started with the purchase of a shop with a post office in Wales. Alan invested almost all his money (65 thousand pounds sterling) into this business and was unpleasantly surprised when accusations of hiding revenue began to pour in from the British post office.
Years later, the number of errors found in the Legacy Horizon IT System will be such that they will begin to be named after the post office numbers where they first struck at the reputation of honest postmasters. However, at the turn of the century, information spread incomparably slower than it does today, and many postmasters incriminated themselves, convinced that their case was unique and that they were the ones who worked incorrectly with computers. Thus, separated due to a 9-month prison term from her two small children, postmaster Janet Skinner admitted in an interview with the BBC that throughout the investigation she had no idea that hundreds of similar cases had been initiated in recent years parallel to her case.
Alan Bates not only rejected such suspicions against him, but also led the fight to clear the reputation of hundreds of his colleagues. Armed with a telephone directory, Alan compiled a list of post office owners, after which he began bombarding them with calls. Social networks and group calls were still more than a decade away, but Bates, armed with personal charisma and titanic work ethic, was able to convince hundreds of postmasters that they were not alone in their problem with Horizon. The result of this cooperation was an article in Computer Weekly magazine in May 2009, where for the first time to a wide audience the thesis was put forward that the Horizon accounting software is unstable.
On the wave of public attention to what was happening, in the fall of the same year, Alan created the organization "Justice for Postal Workers". Alas, it was still many years before the first successes in the unfolding confrontation.
555 samurai
Legal battles with such a giant as "Post Office Britain" drained all the juices from the fighters. To continue paying for legal services, Alan had to spend every pound of the money raised from the sale of the store. A parallel investigation by the Post Office, which did not reveal any problems on the Horizon platform, as well as veiled threats that the corporation showered Bates' supporters with, did not make the task easier.
However, the turning point came in 2019: a group of 555 people, who had filed a class action lawsuit against "Post Office Ltd" two years earlier, managed to reach an out-of-court settlement with the corporation. According to this agreement, the affected post office owners received compensation, which is estimated to be between 58 and 73 million pounds according to various sources.
Although most of this amount immediately went to pay off debts to the lawyers who handled the case, this deal is considered the first milestone of success in the bloody struggle for justice, as it was followed by a ruling from the High Court of England and Wales. It stated that the LHITS accounting system contains a number of critical flaws, and it is responsible for most of the shortages.
Pendulum of Justice
In recent years, Alan Bates' struggle has been regularly covered in newspapers, and BBC Radio 4 aired a detailed 10-episode documentary podcast about this tragedy. Even Rishi Sunak, while still Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, made a statement about the need to finally get to the bottom of what happened and compensate the victims for their moral and material damage.
On this scandal, the UK authorities have reached a complete consensus. The Minister of Justice proposed to Parliament to pass a law that would annul the sentences of all the defendants in this case (until recently, less than a hundred had been successfully appealed). Scotland Yard has initiated an investigation into possible manipulations within the "Post Office" itself – the attempts by the corporation's lawyers to pressure independent IT experts, as well as the expenditure of enormous resources to hide the true state of affairs with Horizon, have not gone unnoticed.
In general, as sometimes happens, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Now, on the official Post Office website, you can find a roadmap for payments to postmasters from the state corporation.
It is curious to note that Sir Wyn Williams, who heads this investigation and is the former Chief Justice of England and Wales, regularly criticizes this compensation policy as insufficient and dragging the matter out. On the website of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, curated by Williams, where all the evidence on the British postal scandal is collected, you can find a gigantic eighty-page report POL00028094 - BA/POCL Automation Programme Review, HM Treasury Independent Panel Report, which is intended to help understand the specific reasons for the failures in the Horizon system that ruined so many lives.
The Word of Fujitsu
Many people are probably wondering if the British postal scandal has somehow affected the Fujitsu corporation. At the time of the series' release, its capitalization was 24$ billion. Some publications noted a drop in value of about 1$ billion over six months, but such fluctuations are absolutely normal in the medium term, so the British postal scandal is unlikely to affect the financial well-being of its shareholders.
What cannot be ruled out in the foreseeable future, however, are high-profile lawsuits, especially interesting in light of the fact that for the last quarter of a century, UK government agencies have continued to sign multi-billion dollar contracts with Fujitsu. And from the FAQ to the Horizon Shortfall Scheme program, it is interesting to learn that new versions of the same accounting software continue to be used by thousands of post offices across the country - we are talking about Horizon Online HNG-X ("HNG-X"), released in 2010, and Horizon Online HNG-A ("HNG-A"), released in 2017. Regardless of whether anyone sues Fujitsu, the corporation's name is sure to appear in the media many more times in connection with the British postal scandal.
For now, those affected by Horizon's vulnerabilities and bugs have to settle for apologies. Recently, they were offered by the company's CFO, Takeshi Isobe. He emphasized that Fujitsu is no longer the same as it was in the 90s and today adheres to the highest ethical standards of doing business.
Director of Fujitsu Services Paul Patterson and CEO of Fujitsu Takahito Tokita joined the apologies. It is unlikely to touch the hearts of the relatives of those post office owners who did not live to see the "rehabilitation" after the "repressions". But who knows what the end of this story will be if it is ever put to an end?
Moral of this fable
The phenomenon of the British postal scandal can be viewed from different angles. But first of all, it is a story about how corporate mistakes can be funny, and there are those that easily destroy the lives of thousands of people. And, on the other hand, that David, whose role was tried on by Alan Bates, sometimes still manages to cope with Goliath.
However, the bittersweet taste of the plot about the restoration of trampled justice only highlights the fear of computer system errors that entail catastrophic consequences.
Adding fuel to the fire of such fears is the statement at one of the court sessions by a Fujitsu employee that the data in the Legacy Horizon system could theoretically be changed remotely. Another former employee, Gerald Barnes, said that his employers knew about the problems with their software, but together with the "Post Office of Britain" hid it, since the revision and updating of the system in a short time would have cost everyone too much.
For some, the thought that there could be intruders among the Post Office employees who were winding up shortages for their victims is reassuring. After all, then the problem lies in banal human greed, and not in the vicissitudes of blind digital elements.
For others, the idea that anonymous criminals can cover up holes in the accounting system for decades, bringing hundreds of people to ruin, is even more dystopian.
Strangely enough, when Alan Bates was given the floor once again, in his interview with The Times, he rather gently noted that what happened has many reasons, and there is no need to choose between the incompetence of the state corporation and malicious intent. What would you answer in his place?
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