So, this post office palaver then

fez said:
Its completely astonishing. Heads should roll and people should end up in prison. They have ruined thousands of lives, caused deaths and lied through their teeth. The fact they had an entire department dedicated to manually fixing errors means they were absolutely aware of the issues.

I don't believe for a second that Paula Vennells didn't know exactly what was going on and if she did and she persisted in the cover up she should never see the light of day. This is the banking crash all over again. People wilfully ruining lives for their own financial gain and greed and the consequences are....nothing. Who gives a crap if she returns her CBE. She should be in jail and bankrupt. Perhaps she will appreciate what she did to hundreds of people then.
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You can't actually return an honour. She could mail the medal back to the honours committee but she'll remain a CBE, so it's a worthless gesture. Only the king can remove an honour from someone once it's been bestowed.
 
Kelt said:
Binge watched it last night, absolute disgrace that this happened.

And how many P.O. or Toshiba employees who actively enabled this witch hunt that ended up in prosecutions ans suicides are getting prosecuted themselves?

You guessed it, a big fat zero.

Hell, they even gave one of them a CBE!
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Almost certainly zero Toshiba employees, hopefully a few Fujitsu ones will get it though but chances are still slim
 
Interesting thing in regards the CPS is that it kind of leads to there being more actual fraud, like something outside the post office remit was detected whilst they were investigating.
Its actually quite possible the CPS related ones are in fact less dodgy than the ones the CPS didn't get involved in.
Thats not for sure but I don't think the post office were lacking in any powers needed to prosecute in regards potential post office thefts.
 
Fubsy said:
Imagine giving your whole life savings, your business, your home (or at least heavily re-mortgaged) and your potential future financial security and the options that gives you and the money just goes into the PO and contributes to their profits - or, you go to jail.

You know what makes me mostly mad though? This has been going on for so damn long, and it takes a dramatic TV show that pulls at heart strings for the public to take notice on a large scale, yet some many other banal stuff causes outrage on a weekly basis :mad:
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That's pretty standard though. I can't imagine most of the British public keeping up with current events - and to some extent you can't blame them with the state of the media in this country.

Make a drama out of it though, and people will get onboard.

I was going to create a thread the other day after watching the start of Mr Bates and was surprised there wasn't much mention of it on here.

It'll be pretty easy for the government to have the Post Office on the hook, but I do hope they can hold Fujitsu to account as that was truly shocking behaviour on their behalf. Software development is never going to perfect, but just dismissing any faults raised is very bad.
 
jaybee said:
Did alarm bells not start to ring after a bit? Maybe after a decade and a few hundred cases?
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They were probably giving themselves bonuses for all the "thieving" postmasters their shiny new application was catching.

I haven't watch the TV drama yet, but this scandal has been known about for years and the government has been done very little.

Will we now see a flood of TV shows to highlight causes to get the government to take action.
 
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Is there any hope for some proper retrospective justice against those who are responsible/covered it up?

It feels like such action just never happens; everyone says 'sorry' and goes about their lives.
 
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Tom_ed1987 said:
Is there any hope for some proper retrospective justice against those who are responsible/covered it up?

It feels like such action just never happens; everyone says 'sorry' and goes about their lives.
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I doubt that any will be held accountable, justice system is far to cumbersome for that type of thing. Just delay and evade that's how that side of it works and beat the victim into submission.
 
I remember hearing news and even a Panorama(?) programme about this years ago I can't believe its still dragging on with so little change to the handful of prosecutions overturned or compensation issued and its taken a TV drama for people to "wake up" to the issue (or this or any other government to pay attention, previous commons debates only attracted a handful of attendees now suddenly they can't get enough of it). Unbelievable. The drama and I've watched some of it I've got to watch the rest isn't going to win any gongs for acting what it does do though is crystalize in peoples minds exactly what an appalling miscarriage of justice that has occurred to perfectly ordinary and honest people, something that had been a nebulous and distant thing for most people even if they have heard of it

Pants said:
Pathetic from government that they are only being seen to act now that it would benefit them in the public eye. They were well aware before the documentary.

We need to see execs being held accountable for their dishonesty rather than just being able to hop to another executive role, where past mistakes seem to be instantly forgiven because your face fits and you have the right contacts.

Prosecutors need their powers stripped and to be made accountable for pushing cases with no real evidence, and dishonestly suggesting they ever had a case for theft to push for guilty peas on lesser charges.

Judges need hauling over the coals for accepting cases with a lack of real evidence.

Drives me mad that those with power can walk away from this stuff unscathed.
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They can and do and all the time remember the recent scandal about the nurse who was murdering babies? The managers who covered it up who told potential whistleblowers they'd lose their jobs if they piped up and even forced some of the staff who knew what was going on to apologise to the nurse in question? The managers directly responsible simply jumped ship to another equally high paid and can't-be-touched govt job and completely avoided any scrutiny or serious investigation whatsoever. Because the PO like the NHS is a qausi-governmental organisation where this sort of thing can and does happen all the time where they simply get away with it.

Judges can only deal with the evidence thats placed in front of them the thing that most people including me weren't aware of is that the PO can start criminal procedings against people entirely separately from the CPS because of an ancient 300 year old law that shouldn't exist in this day and age
 
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Tom_ed1987 said:
Is there any hope for some proper retrospective justice against those who are responsible/covered it up?

It feels like such action just never happens; everyone says 'sorry' and goes about their lives.
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Now that there’s pressure from the public and votes at stake they might get a sorry, maybe a small pay off and convictions overturned. It’s been going on for that long though, is it really justice for those who have lost livelihoods and loved ones? I doubt there will be any legal action against those involved in the cover ups.

I’m staggered people didn’t know more about this, I remember it all kicking off when I was a teenager.
 
shifty_uk said:
Now that there’s pressure from the public and votes at stake they might get a sorry, maybe a small pay off and convictions overturned. It’s been going on for that long though, is it really justice for those who have lost livelihoods and loved ones? I doubt there will be any legal action against those involved in the cover ups.

I’m staggered people didn’t know more about this, I remember it all kicking off when I was a teenager.
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It's called society's attention span, something else is always pushed to the front of the news.
Ratings rather than facts are the watch word
 
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JonRGV250 said:
It’s the Mail so mileage may vary, but it’s some demand to insist on immunity if true..



I can’t quite remember if they actually traced all the money that was paid by the sub postmasters, did it all go into a fund then into the profits?
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I don’t know this guys background but if he’s just an architect involved in the project then its shocking to see him named and shamed like this. Probably a cog in the overall delivery, was he project owner, did he sign off QA and oversee UAT… probably not.
 
shifty_uk said:
I don’t know this guys background but if he’s just an architect involved in the project then its shocking to see him named and shamed like this. Probably a cog in the overall delivery, was he project owner, did he sign off QA and oversee UAT… probably not.
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In the documentary their where a few who knew it wasn't working right but when passed on the upper management never checked up on it. I'm willing to bet he was one of them who was blowing the whistle but ignored.
 
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Mercenary Keyboard Warrior said:
Can't resist, I know I shouldn't mock the afflicted.

We can certainly blame Kier though ;)

Back on topic.

As an accountant I could never work out why one of the defenders never really engaged a proper forensic accountant, or hell, even a decently experienced one.
If I was looking into something like this now I would take regular snapshots of data and run a parallel paper system along side for a week or so.
The system was in effect from what I can tell performing an automated daily till and stock balance. As such at the end of the day when you entered the till balance and details of electronic transactions the system would go "error does not balance, your short £xxx"

I think part of the point of the rollout of the system was however to detect fraud (It was deemed there was fraud within the post office). The post office went from highly manual, and I suspect basically with no real ability to really reconcile sub post offices to in effect a system that they thought would give them full visibility and instantly start detecting the bad eggs who were stealing.
I think it was very much thought to be working as intended at the start. Then you get confirmation bias. We detected 100 people, 98 gave in and "admitted it" so its working. Thumbs up everyone!
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I suspect the reason the defendants didn't employ a forensic accountant was largely cost and not knowing they needed to, also trusting the computer was right or thinking that the post office would find and fix the issues.
Not to mention by the time they realised it was a really serious issue it was too late as they were locked out of any new use of the system and the historic records were not reliable.
Don't forget that any paper records would be the defendants word against that of the computer "experts" at the post office and a computer system that the court was being told could not be wrong.

From memory one of the issues with the system was that there was basically no automatic, basic checking of transactions as they were sent and acknowledgement of them being received by the servers, so if the terminal thought something hadn't gone through it tried again. Basically from what I remember reading, the system didn't do some of the most basic stuff that had been in place in other systems for decades.

Then there is the whole farce where it seems that post office support staff could log into the terminals using the sub postmsters credentials/under the sub post masters account, something that in it's own right, if true should have had every case (if honestly presented) thrown out, as if someone has access to an account without it logging, then there is no longer an audit trail that is legally acceptable.
 
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