The Biggest Software Scandal in the UK: The Horizon Postal System.

 At work there's a big hubbub about the series "Mr Bates Vs The Post Office", the series that relates the sad tale of the Royal Mail Postmasters/mistresses that were prosecuted for missing funds. Funds that were not missing, but inaccurately calculated by a faulty software system called Horizon.

I was aware of it from the beginning and was stunned at the viciousness of the prosecutions based on what exactly? A computer program that was clearly faulty?

I talked in my previous post about poorly written code that uses a subroutine maybe once in a blue moon under very special circumstances that never gets tested and could continue to harbour faulty code unless the test regime was very strict and tested every single scenario.

That's what I suspect happened in the case of the Horizon system: that under normal day-to-day operations there wasn't an issue, but the unfortunate postal workers that created a rare scenario that used the faulty code came across the issue and through no fault of their own suffered from the effects of bad code.

That the people in charge of the system didn't start to doubt the system when more people started to report issues was a black mark against them. Certainly there was poor management of the situation at the middle management level and above.

It's one thing to ignore issues and possibly lie to cover up bad code, but when it gets to the level of court cases, prosecutions and jail time, the software must not be trusted. It needs to be forensically checked to confirm if the software is doing what it's supposed to do and it shouldn't be assumed that the code is perfect. It very rarely is. 

There's always the chance of an undetected bug in the code and it's the responsibility of the software department to investigate thoroughly. It should also be the remit of the court to bring in independent investigators to check the accuracy of the code and run through the scenarios the people accused of fraud went through, to eliminate software errors. 

It's pretty damning that the Post Office covered up the issues when they knew they were there. When people in the Post Office couldn't themselves make the system work like it should.

The people involved in managing the situation should hang their heads in shame. Those at the top should be prosecuted for misuse of public office. The fact that the Post Office has extraordinary powers to criminally prosecute people in court without the Crown being involved should also mean that those in charge have a duty to not misuse those powers and should themselves face prosecution if they do.