Sent To Jail Because of a Software Bug 239
First time accepted submitter toshikodo writes "The BBC is reporting a claim that some sub-post office workers in the UK have been sent to jail because of a bug in the accounting software that they use. The Post Office admits Horizon computer defect. I've worked on safety critical system in the past, and I am well aware of the potential for software to ruin lives (thankfully AFAIK nobody has been harmed by my software), but how many of us consider the potential for bugs in ordinary software to adversely affect those that use it?"
Private Eye / Nick Wallis's article (Score:5, Informative)
Private Eye [private-eye.co.uk], a fortnightly UK satirical and news magazine first raised this issue
almost two years ago. Here's a link to the journalist's blog article. [blogspot.co.uk]
The summary isn't very good (Score:5, Informative)
To resummarize:
Sub-postmasters, for those who aren't aware, are private subcontractors of the UK postal system. They are not directly employed by the government, they operate as private businesses.
The UK requires them to use specific software, called Horizon, to manage all transactions and accounting.
This software had a pretty serious bug that resulted in wrongly calculated shortfalls into the thousands of pounds. Their contracts, however, stipulate that they must make up for shortfalls themselves. Doesn't matter if the software is wrong, that's what it says, that's what it is (sounds like government to me...)
This bug went unfixed for years, despite numerous complaints and reports.
Some postmasters started falsely reporting the shortfalls as the obviously miscalculated numbers climbed to ridiculous amounts (tens of thousands) that would put them out of business by the end of the day. Because falsely reporting accounting numbers is illegal (even though the "right" numbers are obviously wrong and completely not the postmasters' fault), some of them were sentenced to prison, most likely due to the strict, unwavering and unreasoning nature of law.
Basically, they were users self-correcting for what they knew was a flaw in the software they were forced to use, and they went to jail for it or otherwise paid dearly. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. All in all, a pretty deplorable miscarriage of justice.
Re:Private Eye / Nick Wallis's article (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting comment at the bottom of the article that might throw some light on where at least some of the money is going. Mobile phone topups are apparently showing up as declined at POS (which should cause the retailer to not take any payment from the customer), while some time later the customer gets an SMS informing them that their account has been topped up.
Re:The summary isn't very good (Score:5, Informative)
To resummarize:
Sub-postmasters, for those who aren't aware, are private subcontractors of the UK postal system. They are not directly employed by the government, they operate as private businesses.
The UK requires them to use specific software, called Horizon, to manage all transactions and accounting.
The Post Office is not state-owned.
FYI, the postal system in the UK was formally owned and operated by the state, but was split back in 1986 into Post Office Ltd and Royal Mail; the former was privatised. The Post Office operate the physical branches as well as selling some minor banking and telephony* services while RM, which is state-owned, deal with the actual delivery of mail. FWIW parts of my line of work would be much easier if the government actually did run the post offices.
*To make things more confusing, the old GPO also ran the telephones but that part was spun off into British Telecom long ago. Now the new Post Office also do telephony.
Re:helpdesk india or helpdesk must use script fail (Score:4, Informative)
Dude, you're Australian. You're lucky to have some pretty strong consumer protection law on the books.
According to my Aussie friend if you have a problem with Telstra, or any other Aussie telecoms company, you contact the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman [tio.com.au] and your problem will almost always get sorted quickly. He's had to call them when Telstra have dragged their feet fixing his Internet connection. After he complained to the Ombudsman, Telstra were calling HIM back and apologising, and had a team out in his neighbourhood fixing the problem the next day.
We use the same system (Score:2, Informative)
Posting as AC for obvious reasons.
Our postal authority uses the same system (Horizon is the UK post office name for the 'entire system'). The counter system runs something called WebRiposte Essential written by an Irish firm called Escher. The way the system works is that everything you do on it is written to what is effectively a journalling system that is replicated peer-to-peer. It is extremely reliable, and Escher boast about it having never lost a transaction. This journalling system is indeed very solid, it is highly fault tolerant and it works very well. The basic end-of-day reports use this (it's called the message store).
Now Horizon may have other accounting stuff that we don't have here, so I can't say anything about that.
Occasionally we have had a postmaster not balancing, and in the case where it gets out of hand our postal authority doesn't just go and have them prosecuted on what WebRiposte tells them, the facts are verified rather than just accepting what the computer system says. In every case so far it's turned out that there has been theft. The worst one was my next door neighbor who was a postmaster ended up in this situation. He was entirely innocent. It turns out it was one of his staff members who was actually doing the stealing, she was taken to court and successfully prosecuted - not just on the computer evidence, but other physical evidence too. However, this didn't stop my neighbor from losing his job (the sub office employs their own staff, the sub postmaster is responsible for what their staff do too and can end up paying the price). Of course at first he believed his staff member was not stealing - when you employ someone and think they are of good character, you're going to try and defend them. The consequences for him despite being entirely innocent was nearly losing everything - he has a young family and an extended period of unemployment is devastating.
Re:Open Source... (Score:5, Informative)
There's another option that open source gives you that proprietary software doesn't: You can pay someone else to fix it. If it's really that irritating to you, but you really don't want to work on it yourself, why not use some cash to convince a developer to fix your bug? You'll get what you want, the developer will get some cash, and the project will have its bug fixed. Everyone wins.
What you're really demanding is that volunteers do what you want them to do free of charge. What will actually happen is that volunteers will do whatever they damn well please.