Senior Post Office staff – and those working for suppliers Fujitsu and ICL – knew or should have known about the defects causing errors in the Horizon system that contributed to the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of branch workers, 13 of whom committed suicide, most probably as a result, according to the first volume of a government report into the computer scandal.
The Post Office began rolling out the legacy Horizon IT system for accounting in 1999, which, along with its two subsequent upgrades, contributed to one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history.
The EPOS and back-end finance system was first implemented by ICL, a UK technology company majority owned by Fujitsu, in the 1990s and taken over completely by the Japanese giant in 1998. From 1999 until 2015, around 736 subpostmasters were wrongfully prosecuted and convicted of fraud when errors in the system were to blame, devastating lives in the process. A statutory inquiry into the mass miscarriage of justice was launched in 2021. The first volume of its report – addressing human cost and redress – was published today.
“Although many of the individuals who gave evidence before me were very reluctant to accept it, I am satisfied from the evidence that I have heard that a number of senior, and not so senior, employees of the Post Office knew or, at the very least, should have known that Legacy Horizon was capable of error… Yet, for all practical purposes, throughout the lifetime of Legacy Horizon, the Post Office maintained the fiction that its data was always accurate,” the report by inquiry chairman Sir Wyn Williams says.
The upgrade, Horizon Online, “was also, from time to time, afflicted by bugs, errors and defects which had the effect of showing gains and losses in branch and Crown Office accounts which were illusory. I am satisfied that a number of employees of Fujitsu and the Post Office knew that this was so.”
Although the third generation system – HNG-A – was assumed to be far more robust than its predecessors, “these assumptions may no longer be wholly justified given evidence provided to the Inquiry on behalf of Fujitsu and from postmasters who use this version of Horizon.”
The human impact of the longstanding miscarriage of justice was “profoundly disturbing,” Sir Wyn says. Between 2000 and autumn 2013, the Post Office prosecuted postmasters and other branch staff in England and Wales based on accounting data from the Horizon system.
“In each, or at least most of those cases, they relied upon data from Horizon to prove that losses had actually occurred,” the report says.