During the Horizon Inquiry investigation into the scandal with the British postal service, unsightly facts were revealed. Errors in the Horizon software that have led to many employees being unfairly accused of fraud are being passed on by the post office and the software developer, Fujitsu, to each other, The Register reports. Fujitsu says it reported software bugs that were ignored by those responsible. The post office claims that it knew nothing and was generally dependent on the Japanese company.
At one time, Horizon software was the cause of many accounting failures, as a result of which employees of the British postal service were subjected to prosecution, including criminal charges. According to Fujitsu lawyers, the supplier of the Horizon IT platform is not responsible for the dozens of broken lives. The company allegedly reported to the post office for 25 years about bugs, errors and software defects and their impact on the accounting of a government organization. The investigation began in 2021 and is still ongoing.
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Horizon is an electronic point of sale (EPOS) and financial accounting system used by the UK Postal Service. It was implemented by ICL, which was later acquired by Fujitsu. From 1999 to 2015 736 post office managers were wrongly accused of fraud – in fact accounting errors were caused by software errors. As a result, many former postal employees went bankrupt, others went to prison, and some took their own lives. Although many charges were dropped in the courts, 60 people did not live to be acquitted for various reasons.
The post office’s legal representative denies that management knew about the problems, and the lawyer for the former head of the structure, Paula Vennells, denies that she knew about the problems with Horizon. A Fujitsu spokesman said the company had identified at least 70 people involved and there was evidence they knew about the problem all along. This includes members of the board of directors of the UK Postal Service, its top managers and security officers, as well as the teams involved in the investigation of the incidents.
It is alleged that the post office tried to hush up and hide its responsibility for the scandal and is unfairly trying to blame Fujitsu and other “third parties”. Among other things, the mail tried to pose as a “subordinate partner” of Fujitsu, who was in a “technically dependent” state on it, but the investigation did not confirm the statements.
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A spokesman for the Postal Service, in turn, said that it regrets relying on the Japanese company, relying on Horizon’s reliability. As a result, the false assumption that there were no errors allegedly prevented action from being taken in a timely manner – the desire to protect the brand and economic interests of the company also played a role, and the hierarchy in the organization did not allow lower-level employees to take action on the errors. In addition, leadership positions were occupied by insufficiently competent people, which led to a number of management errors. There was no exchange of key information about Horizon within the postal structure either “vertically” or “horizontally”.
Lawyer Samantha Leek, defending the interests of the former head of the UK Postal Service, Vennels, said that her client’s former colleagues from among top managers did not pass on important information about Horizon to either the board of directors or the CEO. The former postal director is said to be “devastated” that the information was not shared with her and has no desire to “point fingers” at others or speculate as to why the information was not shared.
This is not the only case in the UK where software from trusted companies has caused catastrophic events. At one time, the Oracle ERP system actually brought the municipality of Birmingham (the largest in Europe) to bankruptcy – the story is not over yet, and the costs exceeded a hundred million pounds.