This whole Horizon IT scandal is so dystopian and I am to this date amazed they didn’t sue the shit out of their management.
Imagine how many people were wrongly convicted just because your software was shitty and buggy. How many lives have been ruined?
Several people ended up committing suicide because of how financially ruined they were.
They are suing them. It’s just that the courts aren’t as enthusiastic about dispensing justice in case of the executives as they were with the sub postmasters.
It’s just that the courts aren’t as enthusiastic about dispensing justice
In Netherlands there was a system which was supposed to indicate if you maybe committed fraud regarding taxes and benefits. That system was completely buggy, plus highly biased. People went to the highest courts to prove their innocence and the courts rather trusted the tax authority, which trusted the system.
Children were taken away from families, people lost their jobs, etc. This for around 100.000 people/families.
The government knew and ignored that things were going wrong. A cabinet fell, people voted for the same people, pretty much the same cabinet was installed again.
I wrote this from memory, there’s a Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scandal?wprov=sfla1
It went on for ages. People are still heavily affected. Most haven’t been helped. It is one of the many scandals as a result from a majority voting for the same right wing party. People were sold that all these problems were due to left wing parties, now there’s an even more extreme right wing parties trying to form a cabinet. Because obviously it wasn’t right wing enough. Urgh.
It was known that the software was shitty and buggy before it was foisted on the Post Office, having been rejected by DWP (and the Post Office right up until they were given no choice). It was Blair’s decision, he didn’t want to upset Fujitsu or discourage investment from Japan.
Short and long versions of a report into that on the JFSA website.
Pressure from govt to pretend that it worked, and to make the business profitable for privatisation, caused this inhuman clusterfuck.
She was later sentenced to 15 months in prison for theft and locked up on her son’s 10th birthday while eight weeks pregnant. She was put on suicide watch after collapsing in court. Her case was among those overturned by the court of appeal in 2021.
The inquiry is looking into the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of post office operators who were hounded for more than a decade because of shortfalls in their branch accounts that were due to bugs in the Post Office’s Horizon IT system.
This whole story was already shitty. What a mess and how horrible that so many people were harassed and tormented or jailed and fined due to a buggy system.
Imagine having your life ruined and thrown in jail. And then the ‘executive’ who is willfully responsible for it gets away by offering you an insincere and shitty apology! They haven’t even returned the bonuses they got for it!
If this is the way the judicial and economic systems treat the rich and the poor, it won’t be long before there’s a worldwide French revolution.
It’s been going on for decades now and there hasn’t been a revolution yet.
Good for her. She was horribly mistreated, and she and her family were put through hell for something that she didn’t do. Justice for her is not a bullshit, half-hearted apology, so she should feel no obligation to accept that or settle. I hope she pushes on until she gets real justice. And I hope that comes soon.
I had no idea about it before watching the mini series “Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office”.
