Mike Oxsaw
2:09 Mon Jan 15
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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I was at a point a decade or two ago where I had to decide which way to take my career; the choices were telecom or SAP. I chose telecom but since that moment often wondered if SAP, financially, would have been a better choice; never, ever met a poor (or out of work) SAP engineer.
Anyhow, agree with the sentiments on here - the whole management chains of both the Post Office & Fujitzu, plus all the auditors involved need to be brought and held to account here.
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Kaiser Zoso
1:49 Mon Jan 15
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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SAP = over engineered German money pit
The problems with Horizon seem to be centred around its inadequate implementation and subsequent cover up of any problems. The people who were responsible for governance of Horizon should go to prison.
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Northern Sold
12:22 Mon Jan 15
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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lowlife.... sounds pretty much what happened to us... Government IT all in house... all maintained... never a problem... get Fujitsu (Gov contract) on board to maintain our systems... where simple queries on the system would have cost peanuts before now cost thousands each query... multi millions to put their stamp of maintaining systems... when they used to cost peanuts in house... all paid for by you and me the tax payer... jump on a few years... Gov now looking to make cut backs decide that Fujitsu contract is too much (their original idea to bring them on board) so decide to go the Sap route.... been an absolute monetary disaster... paid for by me and you... the taxpayer.... oh and we had a few people chop themselves... luckily enough I got VR took me pension early after 33 years and got out hopefully unscathed... I meet up once a week with some of my old work lot... they have that 1000 yard stare...
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Mr Kenzo
12:17 Mon Jan 15
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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BLAIRS LEGACY
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Bouncing Ludo
11:55 Mon Jan 15
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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I work in IT at one of the largest financial companies in the country, supporting their main accounting system.
We are required by law to have have external auditors come in and poke their beaks into anything and everything on a seemingly never ending basis.
Once the management of PO have been done for misconduct in a Public Office (they're civil servants after all), then they should go after Fujitsu.
The fact that Fujitsu never found and fixed whatever problems there were in all that time (which they MUST have known about) is criminal in itself.
After that any auditors should be brough to task - assuming there were some.
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Manuel
11:52 Mon Jan 15
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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Two episodes in, as Toms said 'decent' is about where I'd put it.
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Lee Trundle
11:19 Mon Jan 15
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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mashed in maryland 8:57 Mon Jan 15
"One of the chief execs of Royal Mail while all this was going on is currently chairman of British Telecom. Doing very well for himself thankyouverymuch.
He isn't mentioned once in the ITV drama about the scandal."
Why would he be? The Royal Mail and Post Office are two separate companies.
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Tomshardware
11:10 Mon Jan 15
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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Watching that Mr Bates drama, decent so far.
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mashed in maryland
8:57 Mon Jan 15
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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One of the chief execs of Royal Mail while all this was going on is currently chairman of British Telecom. Doing very well for himself thankyouverymuch.
He isn't mentioned once in the ITV drama about the scandal.
By a staggering coincidence, he has also served as chairman of ITV.
Adam Crozier.
Comic levels of corruption in plain sight. Sickening. Life in solitary confinement with no parol would be the diplomatic solution.
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lowlife
7:59 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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Mike - either that or the post office were in on it too and so deep in that they felt they had no option other than a brute force implementation.
Either way, it’s complete incompetence, corruption or both.
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lowlife
7:56 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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I worked at a large financial services company for over 20 years. Left with a VR payoff. The tipping point that made me accept that was when they went into partnership with a large Indian IT company who had, and I quote, a “state of the art system” that could do everything the business needed at a fraction of the cost compared to the bespoke systems that had been created over the previous 20 years.
It was an absolute masterclass in how to fuck things up completely. Amongst many other fuck ups there were tests not completed properly, major bugs in production, ‘hot fixes’ applied routinely, things forced through because senior managers ‘accepted the risk’. They also offered redundancy to the engineers, architects, testers and developers who knew the systems and processes inside out BEFORE any migration planning, because the new systems and offshore IT team were so good they didn’t need the knowledge from approx. 200 people with a combined few thousand years experience.
It was an absolute car crash and resulted in people who were retiring not being able to access THEIR money, accounts being deleted, data protection breaches - all sorts of shit.
This all happened as senior management signed a deal and had to make it happen. Not one of them stood up and tried to stop it, one of them even sent out a ‘success’ email when the first few policies went live with the new system. These policies were the simplest of the simple, an excel spreadsheet could have done it. She shut the fuck up when it all went wrong. The guy running the organisation ended up killing himself.
It was years ago that I left, but I still have some resentment to how they completely screwed it up in the pursuit of ‘shareholder value’.
Apols for the long post - just so many senior corporate managers are full of shit, and it winds me right up. Money grabbing fuckers.
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northbankboy68
6:35 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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Mike Oxsaw 3:28 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
Absolutely! Smacks to me of unprofessional implementation and naive project management / governance by the PO. Would have expected users to be involved in the design and running of testing. Testing should have been of the entire process including the system. Would be interesting to see the test scripts and results.
Over and above that it smacks of a yes culture where anyone who pipes up gets smacked down. Sadly this seems to be rife in the UK today. A complete fiasco.
So many to blame - PO management, Jujitsu, civil servants (for accepting the shote they were being told), politicians (including for the disastrous change in the law placing the burden of proof on the users of system rather than the suppliers) and finally the judiciary - for not escalating concerns about the systemic failure in the judicial process. We are one wholly fucked up country.
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Mike Oxsaw
3:28 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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I can't for the life of me work out how or why these issues were not picked up at the pre-launch trial of the software, where a hundred or so various sized Post Offices went live for a few weeks to help iron out any potential bugs.
Or maybe they (the supplier, Fujitsu) chose to have a "dynamic" trial run where they swapped out any accounts looking like they had issues and repeatedly replaced them with others until they (Fujitsu) managed to complete a pure clean issue-free 6 month trial to show to the customer (the Post Office) "everything was working".
Given the likely calibre of the Post Office management at the decision making level for signing off such a project, it wouldn't need much wool to obliterate their eyesight completely, let alone brown envelopes, to have the system accepted.
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lowlife
2:49 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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Cough - he’s a typical thick scouse bully. Imagine those sub-postmasters being ‘interviewed’ by him where he had nobody to answer to or holding him to account.
An investigator who doesn’t investigate, he just does what the lawyers or his bosses tell him to. Absolute scum. Somebody must have some recordings of him in action.
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Far Cough
12:47 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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OK
What a piece of work that Bradshaw investigator is, everyone else is at fault and he has no knowledge of anything.
CUNT
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onsideman
11:39 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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Far Cough 9:09 Sat Jan 13
There were civil actions, but only the Crown can send people to jail
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jfk
11:35 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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Full Claret Jacket 9:46 Fri Jan 12
A true and very worrying thought.
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Kaiser Zoso
10:39 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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northbankboy68 8:46 Fri Jan 12
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
The calibre of leadership in this country is pants.
But not Blair.
When it is proven that he was alerted that there could be problems.
You wanker.
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northbankboy68
10:13 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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Oxsaw
"The document does not reveal any concerns at the time that Horizon software could lead to post office operators being wrongfully prosecuted for fraud, theft and false accounting."
It should never have been signed off for good reasons. However, the evidence presented to Blair was not specific or conclusive at all about the issues that subsequently arose. Beware the dodgy motives of Pravda aka BBC News.
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Far Cough
9:09 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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onesideman, weren't the prosecutors from the Post Office itself?
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onsideman
7:49 Sat Jan 13
Re: This Post Office / Horizon thing
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What I find baffling is that ordinarily the prosecutors in a fraud case would need some evidence that the money that had gone 'missing' but that wasn't actually missing had been spent or stashed by the culprits. That would or should form a key element of the prosecution argument yet it wasn't even considered in any case, neither was the proof that mutiple victims had taken out loans, borrowed from friends and relatives, remortgaged to cover completely notional shortfalls so they were completely failed by the legal system too. The DPP, the CPS and the Bar Council should all be held to account
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