UK Post Office Horizon Scandal, or WTF Did I Just Read?!

[Itse]

Okay so this is UK local news, but this has to be one of the most insane kafkaesque things I've ever read. The number of years and people involved makes this story just absolute bonkers.

Long story short: The UK Post office used a software called Horizon to track account use, among other things. Based on the findings of that software, they took hundreds of their employees to court over a period of 15 years for misuse of funds / embezzlement, an average of one employee per week. Many settled, dozens were convicted to years in prison. Finances and families were ruined, at least one person committed suicide when facing the accusations.

The punchline: no money was actually stolen. The Horizon software (by Fujitsu) was just a bug-riddled piece of crap.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036

The real kicker: the post office knew that their program was faulty at least since 2011, but decided go on prosecuting people at least until 2015.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...shortfall.html

Nearly a thousand convictions relating to this scandal are now under question, making this one of the largest incidents of miscarriages of justice in modern history.

[afc wimbledon]

yep people went to jail

[Itse]

Apparently Computer Weekly has been smelling smoke around this since 2009, and these comments are pretty damning towards Fujitsu.

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/...s-says-insider

"Everybody in the building by the time I got there knew it was a bag of s**t”, he said. “It had gone through the test labs God knows how many times, and the testers were raising bugs by the thousand.”

" allegation is that Horizon’s Epos system was initially built with “no design documents, no test documents, no peer reviews, no code reviews, no coding standards”.

"To my knowledge, no one on the team had a computer science degree or any degree-level qualifications in the right field. They might have had lower-level qualifications or certifications, but none of them had any experience in big development projects, or knew how to do any of this stuff properly. They didn’t know how to do it.”