How the Horizon bug ruined the lives of thousands of Britons

Over the past few years, everyone has become accustomed to news about IT problems in large businesses; many have encountered them themselves. Someone found their data leaked from a delivery service, someone could not receive a parcel due to a ransomware attack that overcame a logistics operator, and someone did not book a train ticket on time due to a dead state corporation application. All these incidents affected emotions, but did not have serious consequences. So it seems like that's what usually happens.

However, problems in the computer system of the state corporation can turn the lives of many people into a real dystopian plot. As has already happened in the story with the British mail and Horizon software from the Japanese company Fujitsu: thousands of destroyed reputations, 700 convictions and 236 people mistakenly sent to jail. Not to mention several suicides…

The history of more than one city

At the end of the last century, the practice of private individuals opening post offices in their shops was widespread in Great Britain. In those years, such establishments easily became the “hearts” of villages or small towns, acting as something like clubs where one could communicate with fellow villagers, learn local news, organize cultural events, communicate with officials, etc.

It is logical that the owners of such stores were public and respected people in their settlements, to whom they often turned for help on various issues. More than 12 thousand of these “village elders” bound themselves to the state corporation Post Office with a contract under which they agreed to provide postal services to citizens, transferring revenue to the company.

The rapid growth of the network of post offices at private shops was facilitated by the active digitalization of British mail, which simplifies any accounting. So, back in the mid-90s, British Post announced a tender for the implementation of accounting software, which was won by International Computers Limited (ICL), absorbed by the giant Fujitsu. She is the author of the Horizon software, the version of which Legacy Horizon IT System (“LHITS”) subsequently became notorious.

The corporation is very evil

At first everything went fine, but already in 1999 Legacy Horizon began to overstate in its reports the amounts in the post office cash registers. Although the discrepancies quickly became widespread and continued to grow, the shortfall was more easily attributed to good old-fashioned human error. The management of British Post did not even want to listen to the worried postmasters, citing the experience of branches where the accounting program was successfully disguised as a bug-free one.

Thus, Jason Coyne of Best Practice Group, appointed by the court as an independent expert in proceedings between the corporation and Julia Wolstenholme of the post office in Clevlins, Lancashire, analyzed a log of support calls in 2003. He concluded that at least 63 calls were related to technical problems with Horizon and only 13 related to issues with working with its interface. In his report he spoke unequivocally about hardware or software malfunction, adding that Fujitsu and/or Post Office for some reason refuse to analyze and solve the problem on their side.

By the way, government corporations in Britain at that time had the now revised right to independently initiate criminal cases. Over the course of several years, British Post, in a semi-automatic mode, brought charges against 3,500 post office owners, which became almost a civil execution for honest postmasters, and often drove them into very serious debts. Suspected of robbing their neighbors many of these people went bankruptwere forced to leave their homes.

In addition to the ruined reputation and debt trap, there were much more serious consequences: as mentioned above, several hundred people went to jail, and four even committed suicide – some could not bear the shame, and others “lost” a hundred thousand pounds sterling.

Who is Alan Bates?

Like many other victims of this story, for Alan Bates, a former deputy postmaster, it all began with the purchase of a shop with a post office in Wales. Alan invested almost all his money (65 thousand pounds sterling) in this business and was unpleasantly surprised when accusations of concealing proceeds began to fall on him from the British Post Office.

Years later, the number of errors found in Legacy Horizon IT System will be such that they will begin call by post office numbersin which they first struck a blow at the reputation of honest postmasters. However, at the turn of the century, information spread much more slowly than today, and many postal workers incriminated themselves, convinced that their case was an isolated one and that they were the ones who were working with computers incorrectly. So, separated from two small children due to a prison sentence for 9 months, post office manager Janet Skinner in a conversation from BBC admitted that throughout the entire investigation she had no idea that in parallel with her case, hundreds of similar ones had been initiated in recent years.

Alan Bates not only rejected such suspicions against him, but also led the fight to whitewash the reputations of hundreds of his colleagues. Armed with a telephone directory, Alan compiled a list of post office owners and then began bombarding them with calls. Social networks and group calls were still more than a decade away, but Bates, armed with personal charisma and titanic efficiency, was able to convince hundreds of postmasters that they were not alone in their problem with Horizon. The result of this cooperation was article in Computer Weekly magazine in May 2009, where for the first time the thesis that Horizon accounting software was unstable was put forward to a wide audience.

In the wake of public attention to what was happening, in the fall of the same year, Alan created the organization “Justice for Postal Employees.” Alas, there were still many years before the first successes in the unfolding confrontation.

555 samurai

Legal battles with such a colossus as the British Post Office sucked all the juice out of those fighting. To continue paying for lawyers, Alan had to spend up to a pound of all the money raised from the sale of the store. A parallel investigation by the Post Office did not reveal any problems with the Horizon platform, and veiled threatswhich the corporation bombarded Bates' supporters with, didn't make things any easier.

However, a turning point came in 2019: a group of 555 people, which two years earlier registered a class action lawsuit against British Post, managed to reach a pre-trial agreement with the corporation. According to this agreement, the affected post office owners received compensation, which, according to various sources, is estimated from 58 to 73 million pounds.

Although most of this amount was immediately used to pay off debts to the lawyers who handled the case, this deal is considered the first milestone in the bloody struggle for justice, because after this a ruling was issued by the High Court of England and Wales. It followed that the LHITS accounting system contained a number of critical faults, and that it was responsible for most of the shortfalls.

Pendulum of Justice

Alan Bates's struggle has been featured regularly in newspapers in recent years, and BBC Radio 4 has produced an in-depth 10-part documentary podcast about the tragedy. Even Rishi Sunak, while still Prime Minister of Great Britain, made a statement about the need to finally understand what happened and compensate for moral and material damage to the victims.

There is a complete consensus among the British authorities on this scandal. The Minister of Justice proposed that Parliament pass a law that would collectively annull the sentences of all those involved in this case (until recently, less than a hundred were able to be challenged). Scotland Yard initiated an investigation into possible fraud within the British Post Office itself – and did not go unnoticed attempts at pressure by corporation lawyers on independent IT experts, as well as spending huge resources to hide the true state of affairs with Horizon.

In general, as sometimes happens, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. Now on the official website of the Post Office you can get acquainted with road map payments to postmasters from the state corporation.

It is interesting to note that the head of this investigation, Sir Wyn Williams, former Chief Justice of England and Wales, regularly criticizes this compensation policy as insufficient and slowing things down. On the website of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, curated by Williams, where all the evidence on the British mail scandal is collected, you can find a gigantic eighty-page report POL00028094 – BA/POCL Automation Program Review, HM Treasury Independent Panel Reportwhich aims to help understand the specific causes of the Horizon failures that ruined the lives of so many people.

Fujitsu word

Surely many are wondering whether the British mail scandal somehow affected the Fujitsu corporation. At the time the series was released, its capitalization was $24 billion. Some publications noted a drop in value over six months by about $1 billion, but such fluctuations are absolutely normal in the medium term, so it is unlikely that the British postal scandal will have any impact on the financial well-being of its shareholders .

What cannot be ruled out in the foreseeable future are high-profile lawsuits, especially curious in light of the fact that over the past quarter century, government agencies in the United Kingdom have continued to enter into multi-billion-dollar contracts with Fujitsu. And from the FAQ for the Horizon Shortfall Scheme, it is interesting to learn that new versions of the same accounting software continue to be used by thousands of post offices across the country – we are talking about Horizon Online HNG-X (“HNG-X”), released in 2010 and Horizon Online HNG -A (“HNG-A”), published in 2017. Regardless of whether someone sues Fujitsu, the corporation’s name is likely to appear many times in the media in connection with the British mail scandal.

In the meantime, those affected by Horizon vulnerabilities and bugs can only settle for apologies. They were recently brought in by the company's chief financial officer, Takeshi Isobe. He emphasized that Fujitsu is not the same as it was in the 90s and is committed to the highest ethical standards of business today.

Fujitsu Services Director Paul Patterson and Fujitsu CEO Takahito Tokita joined in the apology. This is unlikely to touch the hearts of the loved ones of those post office owners who did not live to see the “rehabilitation” after the “repressions.” But who knows what the end to this story will be if it ever comes to an end?

Moral of this story

The phenomenon of the British postal scandal can be viewed from different angles. But first of all, this is a story about how corporate mistakes can be funny, but sometimes they can easily destroy the lives of thousands of people. And, on the other hand, that David, whose role is played by Alan Bates, sometimes still manages to cope with Goliath.

However, the bitter-sweet aftertaste of the plot about restoring violated justice only highlights the fear of computer system errors leading to catastrophic consequences.

Adding fuel to the fire of such fears is the statement at one of the court hearings by a Fujitsu employee that data in the Legacy Horizon system could, in theory, be changed remotely. Another former employee, Gerald Barnes, stated that his employers knew about problems with their softwarebut together with the British Post Office they hid this, because. refining and updating the system in a short time would be too expensive for everyone.

For some, the thought that there could be criminals hiding among the Post Office employees, cheating their victims out of money, is reassuring. After all, then the problem lies in banal human greed, and not the vicissitudes of the blind digital element.

For others, the idea that anonymous criminals could hide behind holes in the accounting system for decades, exposing hundreds of people to the monastery, is even more dystopian.

Oddly enough, when Alan Bates was once again given the floor, in his interview with The Times, he rather mildly noted that what happened had many reasons, and there was no need to choose between the incompetence of a state corporation and malicious intent. What would you answer in his place?