Post Office Horizon system prosecutions

[Gfamily]

What I don't understand (part 93): how come in all this there was never an audit between what the computers said and how many stamps, etc were left in the sub=office ?? !!

Much of the money paid out was for pensions etc, so it wasn't a simple case of double entry book keeping for a straightforward income/outgoings system.

[DJL]

It does strike me as the underlying systems provide a massively stacked deck, in that there are no reliable audit trails available to demonstrate that the things have worked as designed but that what data are available can be presented to demonstrate fraud on the part of the users.

[Lew Dolby]

Yeah, thanks - I'd forgotten about all the new machine printable stuff.

[Fishnut]

First day of witness evidence.

Baljit Sethi was overcome by emotion on several occasions as he gave evidence to an independent inquiry looking into how hundreds of Post Office workers were wrongfully accused of theft, fraud and false accounting as a result of computer errors.

The 69-year-old and his wife, Anjana, who have three children, successfully ran a Post Office branch near Romford in Essex for several decades, and took on another branch near Brentwood in 2001. A year later, the Horizon computer system showed a £17,000 hole in the Brentwood branch’s account, which the Sethis were asked to cover out of their own pocket.

The article also notes that the Post Office has paid compensation to less than a third of the victims and that the Post Office claims it can't afford the compensation so when it does eventually get paid it will be taxpayers who foot the bill. Can someone explain to me how privatisation is better again, I keep forgetting.

[Sciolus]

The Post Office is publicly owned. It's Royal Mail that was privatised.

[Fishnut]

The Post Office is publicly owned. It's Royal Mail that was privatised.

Ah, of course. The closure of so many post offices made me think they've been privatised too.

[sTeamTraen]

Sadly, I doubt if any of the people whose decisions were responsible for this will be seeing any kind of justice this side of hell. The UK taxpayer will pick up the tab, "lessons will be learned", and in some other corner of the world, egos with power will conspire to f.ck over another set of innocent people.