This Post Office scandal is currently ongoing in the UK. The Fujitsu developer in question confirmed what the Post Office was denying, that the Horizon software at the center of the scandal, had implemented methods for secretly editing accounts. Approx 700 postmasters (self-employed managers of Post Office branches) were held responsible when large amounts of cash appeared to have vanished from tills, resulting in prosecutions for fraud and theft.
I know someone who was affected by this, who managed a now-closed Post Office branch here in Wakefield, UK and it was a life ruining ordeal for her. She was accused of stealing £1,000's in cash. I'm not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records for her branch, but the campaign the Post Office ran to smear any accusations of wrongfulness on the part of the Horizon software is shocking.
To be precise it is finally getting some of the attention it deserves, both from the public and from the government.
The miscarriages of justice date from 1999 until 2015, and the high court ruling (about the software being faulty) that finally stopped the flow of convictions dates from 2019, almost five years ago. Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable.
If that delay sounds absolutely bonkers to you then yes, that is what everyone else thinks as well.
They basically allocated a pot of money to pay the people they have harmed off. But these people had to actively go out and request their conviction to be overturned. Which of course many people were reluctant to do, since it means they would be upturning their life again, and going to court and finding lawyers and etc. They understandably have very little trust in the system. So Post Office just shrugged and decided they don't need to keep that much money around.
> One [bug]...would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for.
The fact that this is even possible, apart from the sheer incompetency of a software design that permits it, means that no person can reasonably be accused of stealing cash if that accusation is based on records from this system.
> would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record
Consider the shittiest homegrown shopping portal probably doesn't do that and any commercial point of sale system absolutely won't do that either. The system has to be such a POS internally that no other vendor will take the liability for it.
Reminds me of the Therac-25 that killed people. This thing probably killed more people than that.
Compounded with the fact that the issue was happening all over the country. With a crazy number of different people - and still the issue was not investigated as a possible bug. Oh right, then lied about the whole thing.
Jail is not enough of a deterrent for the kind of enormous damage some of the involved have caused to society. For such large-scale, fully intentional, proven harm to society out of nothing but self-interest over a long period of time, stronger penalties than jail must be applied.
It's insane to me that most of the heat is being directed at Fujitsu. Sure, there's definitely some culpability there, but the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility. There's a lot weighing in on the multi-year investigation that (has been) ongoing, but I can't help but feel like they're waiting for the public furor to cool down before releasing anything.
From the CNN article it seems like the police is going to get involved in this, so at least some good news for the people wrongfully prosecuted by the people charge of the Post Office.
I wonder if anyone thought that it seemed a bit far fetched for 100 postmasters to all steal money. Then when it was 200, it must seem doubly far fetched. Once 500 postmasters were caught "stealing" money, wouldn't someone wonder how they managed to hire 500 dishonest people. Typically when you catch one person you always wonder how many got away with it, so they catch 500 then there must be 5000 or 50 000 postmasters that were stealing without getting caught. How many post offices are there really in the UK?
>implemented methods for secretly editing accounts.
>not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records
It seems to me that determining whether this was a bug or a deliberate backdoor that allowed someone connected to Fujitsu to change account values should have been one of the first priorities of the investigation. The CNN article I read before the BBC article didn't even mention this, it seemed to just imply that this was all a mistake or at worst the government/Fujitsu trying to coverup the fact that the software was shoddy.
Was it the post office itself that was dealing out charges? Like a post office inspector or whatever it's called? Or was it a normal police referral type thing?
Yes. The Post Office historically was wholly owned by the UK Government, so maintained its own private prosecutors instead of relying on the Crown Prosecution Service. This is why it was able to fight so hard to get convictions, they had the funds to pay their own expensive lawyers to do it.
This meant those that fought the charges and lost were then forced to "pay back" the money they "stole" and also pay the Post Office legal fees and being sent to prison. The scandal is sickening on literally every level you can imagine!
So apparently in UK law, the post office carry out their own investigations before taking charges to court (effectively replacing the police for internal post office charges) which sounds mental to me.
My wife and I watched Mr Bates vs the Post Office, recently, it was one of those watches where you spend a lot of time yelling "How the fuck?! What the fuck?!" at the screen because the malice and dishonesty was so deliberate, so persistently maintained, lest the "brand" be sullied.
I've been following this story for years, I know BBC's Panorama covered it in 2015, and was really surprised there wasn't more of an outcry in the UK about such blatant unfairness, guess technical cases like this are really helped by a TV drama with quality actors making it easily accessible to the general population, as soon as ITV aired the miniseries, the petition to have Vennall's CBE stripped jumped from 7K signatures to 700K+, and she said she would return it. (not the golden handshakes and "performance" bonuses though lol)
I just can't believe that no-one has been held criminally accountable (yet) for the sheer (to quote the judges in the civil case) affront to justice that this represented - whether it was Post Office Limited (POL) misleading (well, lying to) the courts, or Fujitsu employees lying in prosecutions, or POL deliberately withholding evidence in their role as a prosecutor (wild that this power to prosecute as transferred from Royal Mail to the spun off entity), and some of the cynically legalistic games they played (like asking the judge to recuse himself for being biased against them, to further delay the outcome of the civil suit).
And the crap they pulled with the Second Sight independent analysis that they commissioned themselves...
I was just reading the Clarke Advice(s), and god-damn, I can't see how any former POL executives can claim "we honestly believed all that stuff we said in court, honest", after their own goddamn independent legal advice told them "stop these prosecutions, like now, your expert witness is full of shit" The 2nd Clarke Advice is a great read too, basically "STOP TRYING TO HIDE EVIDENCE, JESUS CHRIST".
Oh, and some of the code that turned up from Horizon in an internal Fujitsus report is egregiously bad (how do I turn x into -x or -x into x? What's -(-x)? nevermind, I got this), from what I've read, the team that wrote Fujitsus was considered low skilled and mocked by other groups within Fujitsu as basically a group of clowns merely lacking a circus.
Private Eye were one of the few people reporting on this regularly. I've been reading about it in there for close on ten years, and am still astonished that it's taken this long to really hit home what happened to these individuals. Bravo to the makers of the recent show that's brought it back into the spotlight. It's truly shocking what the Post Office and Fujitsu did, and one can only hope prosecutions arise from this.
For anyone working in IT, there are lessons to be learned here about what impact software can have on individuals' lives, and bravo to any whistleblower that came forward to speak out.
The PM's father in law is the head of Infosys. The PM's wife still has significant holdings in Infosys. Infosys and Fujitsu have a close partnership.
And so on. It's corrupt from top to bottom. The UK government is effectively the marketing wing of the huge public sector corporates, who invariably seem to have senior Tories and Tory donors on their boards.
While I don't disagree with the overall premise, Rishi Sunak has only been an MP since 2015 and this scandal has been going since 1999 so I am not sure the relationships you present:
Rishi Sunak -> Wife (Met 2004, Married 2009) -> Father -> InfoSys -> Fujitsu
Add up to any proof or even suggestion of corruption - just rich people know other rich people.
> I highly recommend reading Private Eye's special report
Agreed. For those more audio inclined, I linked to these in another comment but I originally discovered their reporting on this via their "Page 94" podcast:
Yeah. It's baffling to me that Private Eye covered this in explicit, specific detail a decade ago and there were essentially no consequences for many years after.
I also wonder what responsibility the courts hold, seeing as folks were prosecuted and jailed on just IT evidence.
I mean how in the world can you accuse and convict someone of theft when there is zero evidence outside of the IT system. And how in the world was the IT system never scrutinized?
I personally think the prosecutions were a sign of the times when people were still far too trusting of computer systems. I feel like these days, everyone would realize that there would be at least reasonable doubt as to the accuracy of the system, yet when these prosecutions were mostly taking place it feels like everyone just assumed the system was perfect.
If this scandal was about incompetence only, it would be outrageous.
But this was at least a deliberate, criminal cover up at the expense of hundreds of innocent people, maybe worse, implemented with tools intended for fighting serious crime. It seems unbelievable that this could happen in a civilized country.
Paula Vennells handing back her CBE doesn't get remotely close to accountability. Many won't feel a sense of closure until she's aggressively prosecuted and languishes in a prison cell for the rest of her years. I'm actually surprised at the restraint shown by ITV in her depiction, because in real life she bears many of the hallmarks of a cartoon villain.
Which isn't even legally permissible, there is no way to 'give it back' (although you could stop using the title) - it can only be taken from you, which has to be done by the king on recommendation of the prime minister.
For someone not familiar with the acronym, what is CBE?
A quick search shows me 371 different matching acronyms, ranging from the "Calgary Board of Education", to "current best estimate", to "Central Bank of Egypt".
I bet Paula Vennells is lying about that. It sounds like some kind of PR statement to deal with the petition getting over a million votes to strip her of her honour.
The simile is more colourful (and simplistic) than the reality.
The poverty levels are extreme in some parts of the U.K. that are far away from London and the high population density belt that goes through Birmingham to Manchester, lower than in some of the places in the E.U. that one thinks of as the poorer places in Europe. And the infrastructure gets almost zero attention and lip service from London-centric thinking. (Remember the cancellation of the northern parts of HS2?)
But some things are the same as London. I'd mention some, but they would be highly ironic given the subject headlined. (-:
I think the best way forward is for everyone involved in it at Fujitsu and the Post Office gets prosecuted for taking part in a criminal conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
Certainly Paula Vennells should absolutely be in prison for her oversight and deliberate destruction of people's lives.
I think the idea that complex systems are assumed to always be correct is... dicey at the best of times and even more so when it's critical to a criminal case.
> complex systems are assumed to always be correct
..absent evidence to the contrary. But in the Post Office case, the Post Office had all the evidence, and refused to disclose it. As far as I'm aware, failure to disclose evidence that might help the defence is perverting the course of justice. I don't know why no manager's been charged.
It's worse than that - there was evidence that Fujitsu could remotely affect the different branch computers with at least one person seeing it happen before their eyes and the Post Office absolutely denied that it was possible or had ever been possible.
Yep that's a huge challenge. The other one is that individual defendant's are unlikely to be able to afford the expertise needed to analyze a large complex setup, even if the details of the system (e.g. source code) are made available.
Yes it's an interesting point. At first I was horrified that it is so, but then the alternative is to require proof that a system is reliable, which no one could provide. It would need to be somewhere between, talking about best endeavours or something. It sounds messy however you approach it.
It is very tricky. In some industries you see things like device certification and regular external testing requirements (e.g. weights and measures) but applying that to the very fast moving world of software would be .... tricky, to put it mildly.
For some computer functions it makes sense, such as audit logs and other basic operations e.g. timestamps. For complicated accounting software, there should definitely be some kind of proof of correctness such as being self consistent and having sufficient auditing and logging systems.
This is actually one of the few applications of blockchain techs that makes sense - as a write-only store of transactions for auditing purposes, it's potentially very practical.
I can believe this as going thru something along the same lines with my housing association and met police, and it is shocking how many people who focus upon being seen to do a job and lie to cover up their mistakes have grown over the past few decades in the UK.
I shudder at how many scandals never come to light as the process to clear things up and get the truth out is an uphill battle. Oh and my local MP is Ed Davey, who is deeply linked to this PO scandal, though in fairness, he does seem to be singled out over all the others who did less on their watch.
I somehow wonder if society is on a path of race to the bottom at times and amazed how it works with all the flaws that just seem to grow.
Heck whilst typing this I get an email from police about some bail I never attended and yet again, it's the wrong person and has nothing to do with me beyond causing me more grief and stress. I don't even have a criminal record and due to do jury duty later this year, which is unlikely as being driven to wits end.
Think I did poke them a couple of years ago, never heard back. Oh well, way more evidence now and have it somewhat in-hand. Just so slow going thru the process and even then, getting evidence together and data requests and the level of failures just compounding. As so wide and kinda sureal that it is hard to believe. Police and housing covered up and protected an abuse addict (police informer) and ignored so many safty concerns and evidence that people dead due to it and past people who tried to speak out, either dead or gaslighted. Even tried that on me and sadly for them I recorded evidence for years and now case of bring all their failures to light in the open. Let alone all the housing failures that just keep growing. Fact my gas supplier identified fault in gas safty in october that they still not fixed and my concerns that impacted not only my flat but all the other flats (it does as i checked) and entire estate as fault when built and as such making every gas and electrical safty certificate for past 25 years invalid. Seems to fall on deaf ears, even HSE (Health and Safty Executive) seem to be, well they should fix it and toothless. Yet this is just nothing and whole list of failures by them that they already under investigation. Let alone all my findings and damming evidence. The the Met Police.
But hard to really deal with it due to PTSD of it all and decade of abusive neighbours who literally tried to get me killed and not only proof of that ignored but made out the other way around when it is clear as crystal with evidence submitted that is not only untrue but downright blatant lie. Police ignored that and more so, much more in past that it is a history of pure and utter failings and criminal.
Glad I have video and audio recordings proving it and that includes meetings in which police and housing lie and damming as hell. Yet, you would think somebody would care, but dam as I'm not alone in these situations. But look at Post Office scandal - how many people died over that and efforts to get to light. Then the pressure to pursue the truth and effort when others died trying.
It is scary how often things get covered up. There again, I used to work for the BBC and mindful how things can get swept under carpets and ignored like Jimmy.
I am absolutely flabbergasted. At least for American public companies, SOX compliance requirements make it impossible for something like this to ever happen without an explicit authorization in place. The rule is simple: every destructive action (think mutable) needs to have one requester and one approver.
As long as it is logged in some system, you’re golden. This is somewhat enforced through regular publicly disclosed audits. I suppose that’s what Ernst and Young did when they noted in an audit that Fujitsu has unrestricted access to modify accounts without the postmasters knowledge, and this poses risk.
What strikes me as bizarre is that no regulatory body took any action on that report. Maybe the report was private, I’m not sure - I don’t know how things work in the UK. In any case, this really takes your trust away from public institutions. You’re left to wonder, if this was possible, what else might still be possible?
I've worked on HR software for a large organization in the US that relatively frequently gets sued on hiring decisions.
One of the features that the customer desired was essentially an overriding, free-form, editor for the recorded information, as part of the "get all of the information for a case to be submitted to the court" bit.
We didn't do it, because the entire development team thought it was ridiculous, and the person requesting it retired before issue boiled over.
That seems to be one of the points that the BBC article is making, too. Panorama, one of the BBC's highest profile current affairs shows, points this out in 2015, and nothing happens. Post Office Ltd even pats itself on the back that nothing comes of the BBC programme. ITV dramatizes it in 2024, not even handling it as news, and it's immediately Conservative government priority.
Some bright spark at CCHQ realised it could be weaponised against both Ed Davey (Leader of the Liberal Democrats, and former Post Office minister 2010-2012) and Keir Starmer (Leader of the Labour Party, and former Director of Public Prosecutions 2008-2013).
Readit News
To be precise it is finally getting some of the attention it deserves, both from the public and from the government.
The miscarriages of justice date from 1999 until 2015, and the high court ruling (about the software being faulty) that finally stopped the flow of convictions dates from 2019, almost five years ago. Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable.
If that delay sounds absolutely bonkers to you then yes, that is what everyone else thinks as well.
Even crazier. The Post Office just recently lowered(!) the amount of money they allocated for compensations: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67784706
They basically allocated a pot of money to pay the people they have harmed off. But these people had to actively go out and request their conviction to be overturned. Which of course many people were reluctant to do, since it means they would be upturning their life again, and going to court and finding lawyers and etc. They understandably have very little trust in the system. So Post Office just shrugged and decided they don't need to keep that much money around.
From https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post...:
> One [bug]...would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for.
The fact that this is even possible, apart from the sheer incompetency of a software design that permits it, means that no person can reasonably be accused of stealing cash if that accusation is based on records from this system.
Consider the shittiest homegrown shopping portal probably doesn't do that and any commercial point of sale system absolutely won't do that either. The system has to be such a POS internally that no other vendor will take the liability for it.
Reminds me of the Therac-25 that killed people. This thing probably killed more people than that.
Jail. The people who knowingly lied and sent people to prison need to be jailed. Not fined, not given a handie, not allowed to simply retire. J.A.I.L.
They callously wrecked people's lives, including some that committed suicide.
It seems that some people there abused their power and need to cool down behind bars.
From the CNN article it seems like the police is going to get involved in this, so at least some good news for the people wrongfully prosecuted by the people charge of the Post Office.
>not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records
It seems to me that determining whether this was a bug or a deliberate backdoor that allowed someone connected to Fujitsu to change account values should have been one of the first priorities of the investigation. The CNN article I read before the BBC article didn't even mention this, it seemed to just imply that this was all a mistake or at worst the government/Fujitsu trying to coverup the fact that the software was shoddy.
This meant those that fought the charges and lost were then forced to "pay back" the money they "stole" and also pay the Post Office legal fees and being sent to prison. The scandal is sickening on literally every level you can imagine!
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisi...
Also some Private Eye podcast episodes:
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/95
Deleted Comment
Also, strange seeing my hometown mentioned on here!
I've been following this story for years, I know BBC's Panorama covered it in 2015, and was really surprised there wasn't more of an outcry in the UK about such blatant unfairness, guess technical cases like this are really helped by a TV drama with quality actors making it easily accessible to the general population, as soon as ITV aired the miniseries, the petition to have Vennall's CBE stripped jumped from 7K signatures to 700K+, and she said she would return it. (not the golden handshakes and "performance" bonuses though lol)
I just can't believe that no-one has been held criminally accountable (yet) for the sheer (to quote the judges in the civil case) affront to justice that this represented - whether it was Post Office Limited (POL) misleading (well, lying to) the courts, or Fujitsu employees lying in prosecutions, or POL deliberately withholding evidence in their role as a prosecutor (wild that this power to prosecute as transferred from Royal Mail to the spun off entity), and some of the cynically legalistic games they played (like asking the judge to recuse himself for being biased against them, to further delay the outcome of the civil suit).
And the crap they pulled with the Second Sight independent analysis that they commissioned themselves...
I was just reading the Clarke Advice(s), and god-damn, I can't see how any former POL executives can claim "we honestly believed all that stuff we said in court, honest", after their own goddamn independent legal advice told them "stop these prosecutions, like now, your expert witness is full of shit" The 2nd Clarke Advice is a great read too, basically "STOP TRYING TO HIDE EVIDENCE, JESUS CHRIST".
Oh, and some of the code that turned up from Horizon in an internal Fujitsus report is egregiously bad (how do I turn x into -x or -x into x? What's -(-x)? nevermind, I got this), from what I've read, the team that wrote Fujitsus was considered low skilled and mocked by other groups within Fujitsu as basically a group of clowns merely lacking a circus.
Clarke Advice 1: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/...
Clarke Advice 2: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/...
Fujitsu report: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/fi...
Discussion of recusal application by Court of Appeal: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/assets/recusal_judgment.pdf
Private Eye were one of the few people reporting on this regularly. I've been reading about it in there for close on ten years, and am still astonished that it's taken this long to really hit home what happened to these individuals. Bravo to the makers of the recent show that's brought it back into the spotlight. It's truly shocking what the Post Office and Fujitsu did, and one can only hope prosecutions arise from this.
For anyone working in IT, there are lessons to be learned here about what impact software can have on individuals' lives, and bravo to any whistleblower that came forward to speak out.
Fujitsu acted like thugs not just to save face, but because important shareholders would lose money if the truth came out.
Also, this kind of thing:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/fujitsu-post-office-scandal...
The PM's father in law is the head of Infosys. The PM's wife still has significant holdings in Infosys. Infosys and Fujitsu have a close partnership.
And so on. It's corrupt from top to bottom. The UK government is effectively the marketing wing of the huge public sector corporates, who invariably seem to have senior Tories and Tory donors on their boards.
Rishi Sunak -> Wife (Met 2004, Married 2009) -> Father -> InfoSys -> Fujitsu
Add up to any proof or even suggestion of corruption - just rich people know other rich people.
I’m sure that you already know about it, but the bit that gets me is the Russian oligarchs and their money, honours, property and influence.
Assignations, poisoning etc and still the situation is tolerated.
Agreed. For those more audio inclined, I linked to these in another comment but I originally discovered their reporting on this via their "Page 94" podcast:
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/95
(I have the same feelings as mhh__ in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38967529. Just a remarkable and extremely slow miscarriage of justice.)
I mean how in the world can you accuse and convict someone of theft when there is zero evidence outside of the IT system. And how in the world was the IT system never scrutinized?
I personally think the prosecutions were a sign of the times when people were still far too trusting of computer systems. I feel like these days, everyone would realize that there would be at least reasonable doubt as to the accuracy of the system, yet when these prosecutions were mostly taking place it feels like everyone just assumed the system was perfect.
A friendly yet rueful amendment.
But this was at least a deliberate, criminal cover up at the expense of hundreds of innocent people, maybe worse, implemented with tools intended for fighting serious crime. It seems unbelievable that this could happen in a civilized country.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/apr/26/comment.s...
https://insidetime.org/newsround/massive-miscarriage-of-just...
A quick search shows me 371 different matching acronyms, ranging from the "Calgary Board of Education", to "current best estimate", to "Central Bank of Egypt".
This doesn't help.
The poverty levels are extreme in some parts of the U.K. that are far away from London and the high population density belt that goes through Birmingham to Manchester, lower than in some of the places in the E.U. that one thinks of as the poorer places in Europe. And the infrastructure gets almost zero attention and lip service from London-centric thinking. (Remember the cancellation of the northern parts of HS2?)
But some things are the same as London. I'd mention some, but they would be highly ironic given the subject headlined. (-:
Certainly Paula Vennells should absolutely be in prison for her oversight and deliberate destruction of people's lives.
Deleted Comment
I think the idea that complex systems are assumed to always be correct is... dicey at the best of times and even more so when it's critical to a criminal case.
..absent evidence to the contrary. But in the Post Office case, the Post Office had all the evidence, and refused to disclose it. As far as I'm aware, failure to disclose evidence that might help the defence is perverting the course of justice. I don't know why no manager's been charged.
I shudder at how many scandals never come to light as the process to clear things up and get the truth out is an uphill battle. Oh and my local MP is Ed Davey, who is deeply linked to this PO scandal, though in fairness, he does seem to be singled out over all the others who did less on their watch.
I somehow wonder if society is on a path of race to the bottom at times and amazed how it works with all the flaws that just seem to grow.
Heck whilst typing this I get an email from police about some bail I never attended and yet again, it's the wrong person and has nothing to do with me beyond causing me more grief and stress. I don't even have a criminal record and due to do jury duty later this year, which is unlikely as being driven to wits end.
But hard to really deal with it due to PTSD of it all and decade of abusive neighbours who literally tried to get me killed and not only proof of that ignored but made out the other way around when it is clear as crystal with evidence submitted that is not only untrue but downright blatant lie. Police ignored that and more so, much more in past that it is a history of pure and utter failings and criminal.
Glad I have video and audio recordings proving it and that includes meetings in which police and housing lie and damming as hell. Yet, you would think somebody would care, but dam as I'm not alone in these situations. But look at Post Office scandal - how many people died over that and efforts to get to light. Then the pressure to pursue the truth and effort when others died trying.
It is scary how often things get covered up. There again, I used to work for the BBC and mindful how things can get swept under carpets and ignored like Jimmy.
Bureaucracies don't scale well.
Deleted Comment
As long as it is logged in some system, you’re golden. This is somewhat enforced through regular publicly disclosed audits. I suppose that’s what Ernst and Young did when they noted in an audit that Fujitsu has unrestricted access to modify accounts without the postmasters knowledge, and this poses risk.
What strikes me as bizarre is that no regulatory body took any action on that report. Maybe the report was private, I’m not sure - I don’t know how things work in the UK. In any case, this really takes your trust away from public institutions. You’re left to wonder, if this was possible, what else might still be possible?
One of the features that the customer desired was essentially an overriding, free-form, editor for the recorded information, as part of the "get all of the information for a case to be submitted to the court" bit.
We didn't do it, because the entire development team thought it was ridiculous, and the person requesting it retired before issue boiled over.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#....