More on the Post Office Enquiry.

I was Ill for a few days last week, so ill that listening to the streams from the Post Office enquiry seemed like entertainment. 

Some interesting snippets cropped up though.

An IT expert witness called Jason Coyne was invited to be an expert witness on a case regarding the Cleveleys branch. 

His testimony was very considered and from my pint of view, sensible. He testified in July last year, but somehow I missed it. Mind you, that was when I was having car issues and had to find a way of getting a new car. A bit manic back then.

The video is here: 

Having also watched the testimony of the Fujitsu employee (Jan Holmes)  tasked with essentially rebutting Mr Coyne's report into Horizon, it makes interesting watching. 

Jan Holme's testimonuy is here:

In order to rebut Mr Coyne, Jan Holmes seems to have picked, or be provided with a different set of statistics than the ones Mr Coyne used. Again it's interesting how the information is provided to the  Fujitsu expert and he can't explain why that particular (and incomparable) information was provided.

Mr Coyne makes valid points about the information presented by Post Office Limited (POL) about the Cleveleys branch. Despite POL and Fujitsu saying there were no inherent errors in Horizon, there were calls to the Horizon help desk that were categorised by Fujitsu themselves as software errors. A bunch more were hardware errors. Yet any shortfalls or discrepancies in accounting were always placed on the sub-postmaster. 

Up to the point of prosecution. Yet POL's own evidence shows there was an element of doubt that should have stopped any prosecution in it's tracks. So instead it seems POL went for the tactic of forcing Postmasters to plead guilty to avoid going to court.

Even when it did go to court like in the Cleveleys case, it seems Fujitsu and POL were economic with the evidence, choosing not to disclose information that damaged Horizon. Saying that logs were not available, when in fact later on and in their own investigations, Fujitsu staff were able to recreate or extract the very information that Jason Coyne wanted. It may be that it wasn't held to a forensic standard in a secure archive, but if Fujitsu relied on it to rebut an Expert Witness in a court case, then it should have been made available to the defence.

One last thing: Jason Coyne says during his testimony that it's all very well coding for what he calls the "Happy Path", when everything in the computer program works as it should. But coders rarely code sufficiently for the exceptions and issues that crop up when things don't go exactly to plan. Something I've always banged on about when it comes to coding. If you're going to transmit some important data between sites, it needs to be wrapped up and finished with a checksum, so you know the data sent from a remote branch to a central location is correct. The checksum is returned back to the branch and if it's the same then the transfer is successful. If there is an error, then the transfer is discarded at the central location and the transfer instigated again, ad infinitum until the transfer is successful and accurate.

It seems that this attention to data integrity was missing in the Horizon system.

Even in-branch, something like a barcode scanner can pick up random characters and input it to the system. It doesn't take a genius to realise that once every so often those random characters may form something usable by the system like a valid transaction. Thereby causing a phantom transaction.

The difference between branches could be something as simple as a dirty or marked worktop, which spoofs the scanner into attempting to read the marks on the worktop as barcodes. That could be the difference between error rates in branches. Who knows? Certainly not POL or Fujitsu, because that sort of in-depth investigation was never made apparently.

On a different note, watching the sessions with the Post Office "Investigators" it looks like the people POL employed were the sort of people that you find guarding a particular type of camp in a particular country during World War Two. 

Basically enforcers for the Post Office, the Investigators neither investigated, nor it seems wrote their own witness statements, instead showing up at court during prosecutions reading pre-prepared statements. 

All I can say is that it's now gone beyond farcical. It's now criminal. Somewhere in middle-management there was and probably still is a rotten culture in POL. Whether that extended to the senior management and the board I still haven't been able to ascertain. It could well be that senior management were mere placeholders and figureheads, not knowing what was happening underneath them. But in the end, the buck stops very much with them.

I hope that at some point someone in POL is prosecuted for not providing disclosure to the defence in the criminal prosecutions they brought and for continuing to prosecute even when they knew the system was faulty. Even perverting the course of Justice by not providing relevant information to courts. Lawyers, managers and the whole chain involved in providing evidence either hid the evidence of Horizon errors, or they were too incompetent to recognise them.

It will be interesting to see if POL accounting staff are brought to testify for the enquiry. Because somewhere POL earned more than it disclosed, thanks to Horizon. So their accounting was false. I'm intrigued if anyone in the accounting staff raised the issue of excess funds coming into the POL accounts.

Yet another aspect to this shabby story.