Horizon - The Fujitsu/Post Office Scandal

s an IT bod yes, but what happened is that expert witnesses from Post Office and Fujitsu told the courts it couldn't happen, ie they committed perjury.
I think they lawyers need to be investigated as the tone of some of their notes saying "we ae shutting down the claims etc" are frankly horrific 

The Post Office must also lose the right to start legal action it must go through the same system as other cases, how can it be right that the "Victim" also acts as prosecutor 

Back when I worked in banking access to production data in a live system required break glass accounts and one time admin accounts, that all necessitated change control tickets and (typically) director level sign off.  There would have been an audit trail all the way.

There is one element in this whole debacle that is not clearly visible and that is that Fujitsu needed this project to be a highly visible success. This was in order to stabilise its inherited ICL installed base which was melting away rapidly to the competition. Fujitsu were desperate to stop this happening and was prepared to do almost anything to retard these losses.

I seem to remember that the price bid by Fujitsu to do the Post Office job was rumoured to have been way below that of its competitors. The consequence of this was the project ended up seriously underfunded and the developers started to cut corners. This was clearly seen in the systems testing area and the final result was a system that was launched prematurely without adequate testing still full of undiscovered bugs. Unfortunately it was the prime users - the Sub-Postmasters who paid the price. 

PS I have been reminded by one of the members of my then team that when we were carrying out assessment of the requirements of the proposed project, Nixdorf were already midway through running a pilot project using their proprietary banking hardware and modified software in Post offices located in the Thames Valley. I cannot remember how that trial went as before it completed we had withdrawn. Shortly after that I seem to remember Nixdorf got into financial difficulties and was then taken over by Siemens. So to be fair to ICL/Fujitsu it looks as though they were left to pick up a problem child.

I watched all episodes in one sitting. I spent most of that time some combination of furious / upset / outraged.

It was worth every minute.

Gong gone

Vennells to give up CBE immediately

That's my one blot against Alan Bates. He basically asked Richard Branson to give him a free holiday via last weekend's Sunday Times.