The most important part is that the PO used these actions to claw back "stolen" money from its postmasters. This money appears to have ended up in its profit and loss account.
If true this means that instead of the postmasters stealing from the PO, the PO was stealing from its postmasters.
There's been at least one claim - in the Daily Telegraph, so questionably credible, but never mind - that a document exists proving that senior management were aware that the accusations against postmasters were untrue, but carried on regardless.
If that document exists it changes the narrative from accidental tech failure and management incomprehension to something less wholesome.
Jail sentences, bankruptcy and suicide has been caused, management that oversaw this need to face prosecution.
This is what happens when you outsource core financial systems to low cost bidders with dubious tech chops building a message queue system is not fraking rocket science at this point.
Back when I worked on the ground up billing system for Telecom Gold (aka Dialcom) we did this as the existing mish mash of dodgy code that Dialcom offered (Sorry Eric) was not up to standard.
We had large amounts of internal auditing built in and we tracked discrepancies to the Penny.
The CEO blames one of their directors; the Director blames the supplier; the supplier blames the requirements documentation; the Business Analysts blame the culture for creating confusing and conflicting requirements.
Yes, you can hold the organisation accountable but then the people who worked there back then are long gone, they don't care if the Post Office gets fined £500M.
You only have to look at the enquiry into the flammable cladding scandal which was entirely down to fraud, yet, there are people who have not been arrested over their misrepresentation of their products.
Exactly which specific problem is "holding corporates accountable" trying to fix?
If it's that postmasters were being falsely convicted, then the way to fix that is to raise the burden of proof significantly. I hope this case has done that, and next time a court will not accept "computer says so".
With that fixed, the corporates would have to take the (falsely reported) losses; they wouldn't be able to pass it on to the postmasters like they did. Then the consequences of the problem will remain with the people responsible.
Is that sufficient?
The problem is that it is possible to design malicious systems which through incentives, ensure that illegal acts will take place, yet only low-level actors are ever punished. The people who architected the systems and made the decisions statistically guaranteeing illegal activity escape punishment through plausible deniability and abscond with their ill-gotten gains.
Besides this scandal, see the failure to punish any executives after the 2007 crash, or Carrie Tolstedt and John Stumpf of Wells Fargo who even after clawbacks retired tens of millions of dollars ahead, etc.
The individuals need to be held accountable and do jail time. "Just doing my job" is literally not an excuse for breaking the law!
Everyone who knowingly covered this up at least committed fraud and/or perjury, or were accessories to fraud or encouraged or even financially remunerated people to perjure themselves(lower level people getting promoted for lying in court).
Their perjury led the government(in the name of us, UK citizens) into immorally, if not illegally, depriving other citizens of their liberty and money. If the legal framework to punish this as fraud does not exist, create it. If someone knowingly and with premeditation lies to the government and gets other people in trouble, they should get back that trouble sufficiently ramped up to act as deterrent. 10x 100x the fine, fine as percentage of lifetime net-worth whatever. If people knowingly and REPEATEDLY get people thrown into jail, all those people should be doing the amount of jail time they fraudulently inflicted on innocents. If the problem is the organized plausible deniability nature of the crime, I'm sure there's some racketeering or organized crime laws that are applicable. This whole thing literally became an organized crime organisation.
The CEO(s) at the time are the chief persons responsible.
If there are no consequences for harm, more harm will be caused. By not punishing wrong-doers and shortcut takers you ensure that more wrong-doers and shortcut takers will rise to positions of power, because they are able to outcompete ethical players.
White collar crime is literally destroying modern western society, if not in fact(though I believe in fact as well) then at least by ruining popular perception of our (necessary for a society to function) elites. We need to clean house.
There's a big missing culture of fixing problems in corporations. Which of course must start with acknowledging the problem. Which of course means that people reporting problems shouldn't face negative consequences. Which means that the current cultural gap is not just a nice empty void, it's an actively hostile roiling psychological chasm of corporate warfare.
So if random CEO knew about some problems that actively harmed the employees and did nothing, and later a court says that the company did wrong, the CEO automatically has to pay some fines too.
And it should be possible to share (but not completely delegate) this responsibility down the corporate hierarchy, to incentivize executives/VPs/managers/team-leads to do the right thing.
Of course this would need a political culture that is motivated to develop, fine-tune and enforce such a framework. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
what if the ceo was responsible, but was working under the managers "for them" what if managers worked at the same level as thier team whos role is to make the team productive and support them (or even the team could fire thier manager) etc etc
i wonder if disassociating those two (responsiiblity/hierarchy) might be a step towards fixing these kinds of issues...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership#History
> even the team could fire their manager
This would likely help a lot with the Peter Pans who ended up promoted to managers but are terrible at managing.
The issue lies with leadership. Start with CEO for creating a culture where safety and quality is ignored. Go down the chain only if there is considerable proof that someone under them ignored corporate orders and delivered buggy software.
ref: https://www.ingenia.org.uk/Ingenia/Articles/c05470e5-337f-4b...
Maybe the FCC went all NYPD-World-Police on the UK - popped over there to run things for a while.
Seems like the Futisu team running Horizon decided to reinvent everything badly.
Much of government IT was being given to consultancies like Fujitsu/EDS in the 15 years since 1994. These contracts ended badly: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280096810/Why-did-EDS-c... especially for the public paying the bills.
Martha Lane Fox and the GDS pointed out the folly of this approach in 2010 https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story-2010/
They've done an amazing job overall, but hubris overcame them with things like Verify https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.computerweekly.com/news/252...
>For the first 10 years of Horizon’s existence, transaction and account data was stored on terminals in each branch before being uploaded to a central database via ISDN. Our source says this part of the system simply did not work.
>“The cash account was a piece of software that sat on the counter NT box, asleep all day,” he said. “At the end of the day, or a particular point in the day, it came to life, and it ran through the message store from the point it last finished. It started at a watermark from yesterday and combed through every transaction in the message store, up until the next watermark.
>“A lot of the messages in there were nonsense, because there was no data dictionary, there was no API that enforced message integrity. The contents of the message were freehand, you could write whatever you wanted in the code, and everybody did it differently. And then, when you came back three weeks later, you could write it differently again.”
And down further
>Speaking to Computer Weekly in 2015, the anonymous source told us: “The asynchronous system did not communicate in real time, but does so using a series of messages that are stored and forwarded, when the network connection is available. This means that messages to and from the centre may trip over each other. It is perfectly possible that, if not treated properly, messages from the centre may overwrite data held locally.”
>Four years later, former Fujitsu engineer Richard Roll wrote in a witness statement to the High Court: “The issues with coding in the Horizon system were extensive. Furthermore, the coding issues impacted on transaction data and caused financial discrepancies on the Horizon system at branch level.”
BUT the most important part
>So far, nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable