melevittfl
Member
- Joined
- 24 Jul 2012
- Messages
- 18
Such as an indepent report commisioned by the Post Office that concludes the computer system is faulty?
That's the disclosure that Post Office repeatedly failed to provide to defendents.
-
Our booking engine at tickets.railforums.co.uk (powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!
Fallout for rail prosecutions from Post Office scandal
- Thread starter Taunton
- Start date
That's the disclosure that Post Office repeatedly failed to provide to defendents.
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R
RailUK Forums
Yes, but that would only be valid after 10.37 on every other Tuesday, when there is an 'r' in the month !
Mcr Warrior
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 8 Jan 2009
- Messages
- 12,046
So, a 'Parliamentary' railcard?
At common law, evidence produced by a machine was admissible unless there was some reason to doubt it, I think. Section 69 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 reversed this position, but that was then repealed by the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, so the position returned to the common law one.
Either position will cause problems as allowing any defendant to require the jury to be sure that a computer was working properly would interfere with many genuine and appropriate prosecutions. But the current position does make it difficult or impossible for defendants to get sufficient evidence to raise enough of a suspicion about the correct working of a computer system to get a court to require proof that it’s working.
As someone who's done quite a bit of fixing broken software in my time, it saddens me to think that someone, who fixed the Horizon bug(s), could have changed the path of hundreds of people's lives.
The problem with rail prosecutions is that dozens of people across multiple companies are involved, some getting it spot on and some possibly horribly wrong.
Peter Sarf
Established Member
The way the bugs had been swept under the carpet alarms me. Then to not realise the predation going on against innocent victims is very unfortunate. A sign of a vast monolith that did not care. Someone in the post office should have wondered why there were so many accounting inconsistencies and also why so many frauds were seemingly happening.
I hope that lessons are learnt.
1) Never trust that the software is correct. As a programmer I too came across many poor bits of coding and also analysis that fed the bad coding. A typical one was rounding errors. A column total that did not match the sum of the individual values because the total was rounded AFTER adding up the un-rounded values that themselves had each been displayed already rounded.
2) A cultural problem. Seems that some were very keen to nail their victims without carefully reviewing the source of their information. We see that a lot nowadays with trial by social media btw. This has become worse as more companies are looking closely at their very tight bottom line and resorting to throwing the law at behaviour that was in earlier times given the benefit of the doubt. That benefit of the doubt obviated the need to check thoroughly on the facts and background.
I do feel that eventually there will be a backlash and TOCs etc chasing fare irregularities will find themselves tied up in all sorts of red tape. So the rail industry needs to regulate itself in these matters before regulation gets applied from outside.
I just feel sorry for all the victims of the over zealous chasing that goes on these days where they have really done nothing wrong. This is especially bad for the post office victims but even a decent rail passenger seems to be at risk of ending up with a bad record and perhaps dealing with the personal affects badly.
It does leave one with the feeling that someone with a criminal record should now be viewed in a different light as they may not actually be a criminal after all. So the whole criminal justice system has been undermined. And I encounter many who resent the police and law and order. They are the sort who believe fare dodging is a sport, a given or justifiable. My arguments against that anarchic approach to life are being undermined by the predatory nature of the post office and TOCs.
Part of my job involves investigating cash losses in a retail setting where computer systems are used to account for cash transactions and balance the cash at the end of the week.
A computer system in itself does not cause cash to go missing. Unless the cash has been dishonestly removed from the business it will be somewhere. The issue is where. This is actually a question that came up in the drama and it was said that it ended up in a 'suspense account' and then eventually was released into the Post Office's Profit & Loss account after a period of time.
It appears to me that the Post Office investigations into missing cash were deficicient. For starters, as part of the investigation checks should've been made with suspense accounts to check that the balances on these accounts didn't include values that compensated for the amounts being investigated. This would almost certainly been a very labour intensive and technical process to do as suspense accounts in large organisations tend to contain all sorts of stuff that no-one really knows where it has come from.
I don't know how many sub-Postmasters are usually prosecuted for theft/fraud in any one year but I suspect it's a relatively small number. The fact that hundreds were prosecuted (albeit over several years) should have been ringing very loud alarm bells in PO headquarters, especially if this was higher than normal and if there were rumblings about an unreliable computer system. What was the balance on the suspense accounts in this period - was it higher than normal? What other accounts could this money have been posted to. Did anyone carry out a forensic investigation to follow transactions through?
I do think that the Post Office should lose its right to prosecute. The situation with the railway is different - at the Post Office this was an 'internal' issue. They were investigating and prosecuting their own staff (to be fair it was sub-postmasters as franchisees who were prosecuted) but it wasn't their customers who were being investigated and prosecuted. When the railway prosecutes people it's their customers, normally for ticketing irregularities.
Now, I'm not saying the railway should retain its right to prosecute, just that the situation between the Post Office's right to prosecute and the railway's is a bit different. On balance the railway probably should lose it's right to prosecute but there could be some unintended consequences. Currently if the railway prosecutes under the Bylaws the person is fined but there's not normally an entry in the Police National Computer. If ticketing offfences became a civil matter and you'd end up with people not paying and then getting CCJs imposed on them which would cause many more long standing problems in obtaining credit etc. Some might argue that this is appropriate but I do think there needs to be a wider discussion about how railway ticketing offences should be dealt with. My view is it's not as easy as saying decriminalise it.
A computer system in itself does not cause cash to go missing. Unless the cash has been dishonestly removed from the business it will be somewhere. The issue is where. This is actually a question that came up in the drama and it was said that it ended up in a 'suspense account' and then eventually was released into the Post Office's Profit & Loss account after a period of time.
It appears to me that the Post Office investigations into missing cash were deficicient. For starters, as part of the investigation checks should've been made with suspense accounts to check that the balances on these accounts didn't include values that compensated for the amounts being investigated. This would almost certainly been a very labour intensive and technical process to do as suspense accounts in large organisations tend to contain all sorts of stuff that no-one really knows where it has come from.
I don't know how many sub-Postmasters are usually prosecuted for theft/fraud in any one year but I suspect it's a relatively small number. The fact that hundreds were prosecuted (albeit over several years) should have been ringing very loud alarm bells in PO headquarters, especially if this was higher than normal and if there were rumblings about an unreliable computer system. What was the balance on the suspense accounts in this period - was it higher than normal? What other accounts could this money have been posted to. Did anyone carry out a forensic investigation to follow transactions through?
I do think that the Post Office should lose its right to prosecute. The situation with the railway is different - at the Post Office this was an 'internal' issue. They were investigating and prosecuting their own staff (to be fair it was sub-postmasters as franchisees who were prosecuted) but it wasn't their customers who were being investigated and prosecuted. When the railway prosecutes people it's their customers, normally for ticketing irregularities.
Now, I'm not saying the railway should retain its right to prosecute, just that the situation between the Post Office's right to prosecute and the railway's is a bit different. On balance the railway probably should lose it's right to prosecute but there could be some unintended consequences. Currently if the railway prosecutes under the Bylaws the person is fined but there's not normally an entry in the Police National Computer. If ticketing offfences became a civil matter and you'd end up with people not paying and then getting CCJs imposed on them which would cause many more long standing problems in obtaining credit etc. Some might argue that this is appropriate but I do think there needs to be a wider discussion about how railway ticketing offences should be dealt with. My view is it's not as easy as saying decriminalise it.
JohnMcL7
Member
- Joined
- 18 Apr 2018
- Messages
- 864
The missing cash in most cases never existed in the first place. There were bugs in the system which incorrectly added transactions such as when the operator pressed a button while the system was frozen (the Dalmellington bug) or a database error which caused duplicate transactions (the Callandar Square bug), as shown in the TV series when trying to correct the system the sub postmasters could see the losses double or quadruple in front of their eyes. This meant when the sub postmaster tried to balance the system they couldn't, their options were they could make good the shortfall themselves or they could log the discrepancy in the suspense account and potentially could be corrected later. However these corrections could take a long time to happen and often didn't so the sub postmasters instead would claim they had additional cash on the premises which countered the shortfall Horizon had claimed however the cash never existed just as the money that was missing that Horizon claimed never existed either.
When the sub postmasters were being investigated the supposed missing cash was attempted to be found but it never was because there was no missing cash, it never existed hence in many cases the sub post masters were convinced to plead guilty to false account (which they had done by claiming there was additional cash)
Agreed!
The scandal here, in addition to the fact that the system did not work correctly was that the investigations do not appear to have been thorough enough. A proper forensic investigation should have identified what was happening.
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
It’s an interesting one.
My view is that it should be dealt with in the civil courts. It doesn’t need to result in a CCJ- local authority parking fines are enforced through the County Court in a special process without them resulting in a registrable CCJ.
And, as always, it only gets that far if you don’t pay.
The consequences of failing to pay a criminal fine are a lot more serious. At the lower end they can just directly deduct the money from your benefits or your wages at what is best described as a punitive rate. Bailiffs enforcing criminal debts also have greater powers than those enforcing civil debts- although, in fairness, those powers are increasingly curbed. And, at the highest and rarest end, if you’re wilfully refusing to pay a fine, you can be sent to prison.
It isn’t simple, but the downsides of the current process outweigh the downsides of civil enforcement.
I see the railways in a similar light as Capita, who enforce the TV tax on behalf of the BBC. And my experience of Capita enforcement staff is that they have an interesting and flexible attitude towards what the law says they can and cannot do. The railways are better than that, but not by much.
One problem in court cases of company vs individual is that there's a bias towards company evidence being accepted over individual evidence.
There's a Chiltern thread running now in this sub-forum of that very nature where neither side's evidence about a TVM and a member of staff can be proven, but undoubtedly the TOC stating in court that the TVM was working will carry more weight than the defendant's "it wasn’t" submission. It turns the whole "innocent until proven guilty" approach upside-down. [I also doubt any action would be taken against a TOC for lying in court should some 'phone footage come to light before the court case proving the individual's defence to be true].
Even more worrying is that expert forum members state that they frequently photograph/video evidence of TVM failures etc to protect themselves "just in case". Joe Public has no idea of the potential s**t coming their way after a simple "buy your ticket at..." staff interaction.
There's a Chiltern thread running now in this sub-forum of that very nature where neither side's evidence about a TVM and a member of staff can be proven, but undoubtedly the TOC stating in court that the TVM was working will carry more weight than the defendant's "it wasn’t" submission. It turns the whole "innocent until proven guilty" approach upside-down. [I also doubt any action would be taken against a TOC for lying in court should some 'phone footage come to light before the court case proving the individual's defence to be true].
Even more worrying is that expert forum members state that they frequently photograph/video evidence of TVM failures etc to protect themselves "just in case". Joe Public has no idea of the potential s**t coming their way after a simple "buy your ticket at..." staff interaction.
The counterpoint to arguments to use civil claims, which I agree with in theory but believe is irrelevant due to current criminal procedure and practices, is that defendants have more rights in criminal proceedings than in civil ones. The ability for magistrates’ courts to convict in defendants’ absence and the introduction and expansion of the SJP erode that, and then the framing of technical offences as strict liability which often require some proof of innocence rather than the alternative or which have no meaningful defences makes this a technical and theoretical argument - but there’s plenty of room for extremely sharp practice and resultant significant unfairness for those pursued for civil debts purportedly established by their alleged conduct!
There’s an argument that we should create a hybrid category of infraction which doesn’t use the criminal law but which has some kind of court or tribunal system to adjudicate.
There’s an argument that we should create a hybrid category of infraction which doesn’t use the criminal law but which has some kind of court or tribunal system to adjudicate.
Did Horizon ever fail the other way, such that there appeared to be an excess of cash ? (Open question, not specifically directed to @JohnMcL7)
I don’t know
But I’ll add my unanswered question here in case someone can answer both.
Has anything been said about the actual design of Horizon, rather than it just being buggy? In the past I’ve spent two years working on the detailed design of one element of an ERP system, and it’s brutal. Horrendously complicated, especially where it has to differ from the provider’s “base” product. Were there design faults inherent in Horizon, so that even if Fujitsu built it to the specification it would’ve still not worked?
Nut why did nobody do a stock take. a boring job counting postal orders and 1p stamps. That would have shown up the problems with Horizon at day one.
But staff fiddling the system to try and make it balance after a failure is the worst possible thing they should do. They should call their manager and admit to the issue.
Horizon isn't a double entry book keeping system, it's more of a transactions register, which also enables a range of post office products. Clearly all transactions should balance out but there wasn't the granularity of transaction data available to PO Limited or the subpostmasters to go through this. The support contract with Fujitsu only allowed a limited number of ARQ (log data) per month so this was rarely investigated. One lady who worked at Westcliffe took a list of her own transactions and was able to clear herself in court by sowing more than a little doubt with the jurors, by simply going through her list and comparing with what POL was saying. She was still fired by POL despite being found not guilty, and her replacement threatened with dismissal if she gave evidence that she too was finding shortages.
I know the answer to the second paragraph quoted. In a "normal" year, around 5 or so SPMs are convicted of theft or fraud. This went up to 50 plus during the period from 2008 to 2013. In 2014 a barrister wrote the Clarke's Advice, the smoking gun, telling POL of the risk of miscarriage of justice. POL still prosecuted 30 or so people after the Clarke's Advice, and until fairly were drawing on bankruptcy trustees to recover "losses". Lee Castleton, the Bridlington SPM shown in the ITV drama is still under a bankruptcy trustee to this day. SPMs were hand-picked to be honest workers, so I'm now unsure if even the 5 a year can be relied upon.
Separately The Observer today has a leak from the Justice Department to the effect that private prosecutions are under some sort of review by HMG. The Labour party is also looking at this. The HMG version is new prosecution standards, an inspection process and the power to remove prosecution rights.
Surpluses - small ones - did and will happen. But the repeating "losses" was a unique feature of Horizon's operations. Crown Post Offices, so not SPMs, also saw discrepancies in multiple directions, but were not usually prosecuted. Some SPMs did not usually get shortfalls, or they were very small - there were different Horizon configurations and implementations. Some SPMs noticed problems with Chip and Pin, which was bolted on after initial implementation, others had issues with National Lottery transactions - not all SPMs did National Lottery. The staff at Crown Post Offices do feature in the 2000 or so who have claimed compensation - some were fired, others were moved to other roles, losing salary and promotion options in the process. A few Crown staff were prosecuted though.
Last edited:
well if you allow IT support staff to make unauthorised changes to the live database for purposes of testing, I am surprised anything balanced ever! Allegedly thats what Fujitsu staff were doing because there was no separate test system, sandbox or whatever you want to call it.
I suspect here that this is what Post Office expected from Horizon. The systems it replaced were archaic, so they will almost certainly have thought nefarious stuff was happening and going undetected, and that Horizon would shine a light on it. So there’d be an element of confirmation bias once apparent discrepancies began to appear
Correct. PO Limited felt they had them bang to rights, and things that had been going on for years were now uncovered. That certainly covers the period to 2013 arguably 2014 when the two sets of advice from Simon Clarke QC (now KC) told POL that at least some convictions were unsafe since they relied on invalid evidence from a Fujitsu staff member (Gareth Jenkins). So from July 2013 onwards it's all confirmation bias when a QC told them otherwise.
A sneaky way of creating a 'nothing to see here' expectation.
I used to build IT systems. There were sometimes complaints that there was too much logging. Every once in a while, that copious log data saved the day. Either by allowing diagnosis of reported bugs, or correction of changes from errant automated feeds.
Yes, this brings us back to my opening post, what does all this portend for the railway. Particularly as the railway approach of "Pay us a £100 penalty to avoid prosecution" appears to have a close comparison with what the Post Office lawyers were saying to the Sub-Postmasters about making up losses. The "threat" being used to force people to do something. I think many of these at the post office, which of course have no criminal record trail, are still to come out.
What has become of the old law of "Demanding Money with Menaces"?
Yes, this is my concern about some (though not all) of the tales of woe we see in this forum space. Now there are some people short-faring, donuting and deliberately abusing the system with railcards, and quite a few tall tales too with implausible scenarios attached. They get what they deserve. But where someone has no intent to steal, giving them a criminal record early on in life (or even just the threat of it), often thanks to chaotic personal circumstances, just seems an abuse of process. It wouldn't happen in other sectors since the CPS wouldn't go to court for £5.60. Now the implications are much weaker compared to Horizon, but we have a scenario where it's a bit of a money-spinner to TOCs to milk penalty fares and prosecutions, and no effective brake on the rail companies to abuse of process, and with meaningless appeal systems. The jump from an £86 "out of court settlement" to not being believed at Magistrates Court means that threat makes good people do the wrong thing. Rail companies would rather do this than invest in the infrastructure and staff to prevent fare-dodging in the first place. In the case of Wembley, for example, why does it not suit the railways to put in barriers and to staff them?
I generally agree that there isn’t a huge parallel, where someone has been caught by an inspector and cases are investigated individually. However, there is an increasing trend of TOCs and their agents looking for fraud in a far more automated way, e.g. bulk analysis of Trainline data performed by TTL. We saw this a bit with GA and their delay repay threats.
Many of these accusations are likely accurate, but in my view this is where the parallel lies. TOCs will argue that their underlying data is unimpeachable, and one can argue that the defendants should have challenged it in court if they knew it was wrong. In reality, many people will settle, and if companies go looking for fraud that way around they will inevitably include innocent people in their accusations (the accuracy of the system may be less than expected due to the base rate fallacy).
In many situations, including civil claims, it’s ok for 1% of people to be falsely “punished” if 99% of them are accurate. In criminal prosecutions, that’s absolutely not the case. A false conviction rate (including settlements obtained by the threat of criminal conviction) of say one percent is a huge travesty of justice.
Many of these accusations are likely accurate, but in my view this is where the parallel lies. TOCs will argue that their underlying data is unimpeachable, and one can argue that the defendants should have challenged it in court if they knew it was wrong. In reality, many people will settle, and if companies go looking for fraud that way around they will inevitably include innocent people in their accusations (the accuracy of the system may be less than expected due to the base rate fallacy).
In many situations, including civil claims, it’s ok for 1% of people to be falsely “punished” if 99% of them are accurate. In criminal prosecutions, that’s absolutely not the case. A false conviction rate (including settlements obtained by the threat of criminal conviction) of say one percent is a huge travesty of justice.
JohnMcL7
Member
- Joined
- 18 Apr 2018
- Messages
- 864
I think it did happen the other way but the system ignored the excesses or corrections could be issued.
This is a good read if you're interested in that side of Horizon:
You're correct about it being extremely complicated and Fujitsu lacked experience with such a scale of system, their proposal was rated the worst in eight of the eleven categories but they initially offered to do the project for free and they would instead get a transaction fee for each social security transaction (that entire aspect was removed from the scope at some point). At one point a person was brought on board to sort out the development side and he was working with ten coders many of which were not very good, he'd suggested scrapping the entire portion of the system it was that bad and starting again but Fujitsu refused as it would cost too much time and money.
Clearly though a big part of the problem was how they handled problems with the software which were likely always going to happen at some scale with such a large system, there was clearly a lot of cover ups to hide the problems with the software and blame it all on the sub postmasters which should never have happened.
I'm always quite aghast at the way people have been treated when posting for help here and what's quite noticeable is how quickly knowledgeable users here can spot the difference between innocent mistakes and deliberate fare evasion so I'd like to think the train companies can as well.
Yes, but that’s all about the build and implementation rather than the design
For example, did the original signed off design include the back door to the live system that enabled non-branch staff to amend transactions? If so, the person who is culpable is the Post Office person who asked for it and signed off on it, not the Fujitsu coder who built it
JohnMcL7
Member
- Joined
- 18 Apr 2018
- Messages
- 864
That was my point, the problems were primarily around the build and the implementation not the design. Although there doesn't seem to be much public about the original design of the system aside from at a high level but those involved who have spoken out have not criticised the design of the system (aside from woo wide a scope) and have highlighted the problems in implementation.
Until quite recently the Post Office had a hugely positive public image, and probably in the early stages of the Horizon prosecutions I would have gone along with the "I'd like to think the Post Office can as well". But criminal conviction has massive implications and I think that relying on the TOCs to mark their own homework, on the basis of doing the right thing, is dangerous. It was a reckless desire to preserve "the brand" that led to the Post Office shredding documents en masse after 2013-14, since it was believed better that there was faith in the Post Office than to overthrow wrongful convictions.
It sounds from one episode of The Great Post Office Trial podcast that the contract between Fujitsu and the DWP, then later the Post Office when the benefits payment aspect was scrapped, didn’t allow the Post Office access to the code, or meaningful control over how the system worked. It was described as a black box by someone who was involved from the Post Office side.
So it’s likely that Fujitsu coders and support technicians knew that there were ways to access the local terminals from within Fujitsu, but that no-one in the Post Office knew that. And there were rational, if improper, reasons not to press too hard: if Horizon was significantly faulty, vital commercial partners whose services Post Office branches sold, such as the National Lottery and some banks etc, might pull out, which could have been financial ruinous to the business. Not that this excuses anything, but it provides additional reasons for the Post Office approach on top of assumptions by investigators that people with access to cash are relatively likely to steal it.
So it’s likely that Fujitsu coders and support technicians knew that there were ways to access the local terminals from within Fujitsu, but that no-one in the Post Office knew that. And there were rational, if improper, reasons not to press too hard: if Horizon was significantly faulty, vital commercial partners whose services Post Office branches sold, such as the National Lottery and some banks etc, might pull out, which could have been financial ruinous to the business. Not that this excuses anything, but it provides additional reasons for the Post Office approach on top of assumptions by investigators that people with access to cash are relatively likely to steal it.
OK. So if that’s the case, it’s even more damning for Post Office / Fujitsu as it would appear that people not only found the build failure (back door to the live store systems) but then actively and repeatedly used it. That isn’t bad code and oh dear something bad happened, it’s a million times worse