Paula Vennells has blamed a former Post Office IT director for issues with the Horizon computer system not being investigated in 2009.
In her written evidence to the public inquiry, the organisation’s disgraced former boss revealed that an article by Computer Weekly on problems with Horizon was dismissed as “nonsense” by bosses.
Mike Young, the former operations director, who was in charge of IT at the Post Office until 2012, allegedly said that the trade magazine “did not know what it was talking about”.
Mr Young had been “adamant” that the article, which first revealed the plight of sub-postmasters suffering unexplained accounting shortfalls, should not be treated as a “red flag”, according to Ms Vennells.
And CW have recently been taking a look at the earlier system, Capture.
How many times do we see this in British management ( commercial an political ) ?
An incurious, not very bright and probably lazy CEO gets lied to by subordinates and does not have the wit to investigate further and ‘hopes the problem goes away.’
I’ve seen it from small companies to the largest and government departments. Sometimes they get away with it but more often it goes bang and could have been defused right at the start.
ICL wrote software that lacked a key feature designed to prevent these anomalies from happening. My guess is because they had some nonsensical time limit on transactions written in the contract by commercial non technical people. How many times have I seen that happen ?
My missus used to write and sell just this sort of application. She must be turning in her grave.
Computer Weekly has been around for decades. It was there when I started IT and a great read. There was a regular article from someone in Ferranti, I believe, taking about his experiences and showing that even then management were incompetent. It resonated across the industry.
Their journalists were on the ball and although they probably have changed over the years articles like that should set off alarm bells. It didn’t because the cover up was already in place.
Time for Justice but I’m not holding my breath.
But she’s breaking the convention!
Civil Servants run things. When things go wrong Politicians take the blame.
When things go wrong Politicians take the blame.
Agree 100%. Now who was the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business with responsibility for Employment Relations, Consumer and Postal Affairs between 2010 and 2012 when it all kicked off?
Hint – I’ve mentioned his name on here recently. Isn’t that right Sir Ed?
A big CEO did it, then ran away.
There seems much that Vennells wasn’t involved in, wasn’t told about or can’t recall.
Is it me or wouldn’t the fact that close on a 1,000 Post Office operates were prosecuted make this the single most important thing she should be looking at? It wasn’t a few or even a few dozen.
And she’s constantly bursting into tears while giving evidence (can’t help thinking her tears are only for herself). Was someone so apparently emotionally fragile the right person to be in charge?
And she’s constantly bursting into tears while giving evidence
Seems to be the fashion though. The Jockish poison dwarf had the waterworks full on when she was in the hot seat, couple weeks back. Not just the women either. Didn’t Handycock try the tears for sympathy ploy?
Ottokring,
“ICL wrote software that lacked a key feature designed to prevent these anomalies from happening. My guess is because they had some nonsensical time limit on transactions written in the contract by commercial non technical people. How many times have I seen that happen ?
My missus used to write and sell just this sort of application. She must be turning in her grave.”
It’s mostly about a lack of care, a lack of testing. People in the public sector don’t test software enough. And this comes down to a fundamental problem that none of them stand to lose much. You don’t have senior management (the politicians) with a real stake in things (as in, they lose their fortune if it goes bad) so how much are they going to make sure that they hire the right sort of person in terms of financial control vs other factors. Does someone like Ed Davey know what a good manager of a financial services organisation looks like, as he had never run it before? So you then get someone like Vennells who can’t smell the bullshit from the IT people, like they should be able to.
And personally, I detest most of the large consultancies. They are overwhelmingly cowboys looking for how to cut corners. And make their money from idiots who think that custom IT is like buying stationary. You can treat off-the-shelf IT (e.g. buying MS Office) like that. But custom work requires involvement. And there’s really no saving from hiring IBM, Fujitsu, Accenture over employing people. You’re still going to need the same number of people because it’s custom.
Andrew C,
A quick google says there are 11500 post offices in the UK. Even at that gross level, nearly 10% of those had people prosecuted and she didn’t know?! Hanging is too good for her.
Colleagues and I wrote quite a bit of scientific software over the years. When we sold the stuff to companies the deal was always that (i) the companies would upgrade to their own standard while (ii) we would consult for them to ensure the science stayed right.
In three cases the companies hired one of my research group so that they had a bloke who both knew the science and was an employee who would modify the code to suit the company.
We also agreed that once the company had taken over the software cock-ups were their responsibility.
It’s odd that management never considered the implication of so many posties were being prosecuted. With prosecutions approaching one for every ten post offices the question should have been asked what was wrong with the recruitment process to attract so many dishonest workers.
Can someone enlighten me on what exactly what went wrong?
AFAIUI, transactions would be uploaded to the central system, in batches I think, and occasionally the uploads would fail. Sometimes the amount would already have been added though, which would then suggest a shortfall. Is that correct?
If so, where did the “extra” money go?
I don’t say this is the only thing that went wrong. But one of them was trivially – and badly – simple.
If a transaction is incomplete (say, bad comms, modem drops etc) then the system should disregard it. Horizon would, often enough, count the first as happened, then also count the repeat as happened. Yes, slightly more than that but that’s the core of one of the problems. And somsehitng that no banking system should ever do, it’s just insane that it did.
It’s rather unfortunate that as they blame each other, conjuring a rats in a sack analogy, that she looks so much like a diseased rodent herself.
Re Tim Worstall @ 11:44am.
That’s what I understood too. However, that ought to have been (quickly) detectable as too much money appearing as income relative to the things actually sold. For example, somebody buys a book of stamps; then another one; but only one book of stamps disappears from inventory.
What happened to the “extra” money is a really important question.
@HarryHaddock’sGhost
I knew I’d seen that face before! It was by the bins at the back of a dodgy takeaway.
Very easily detectable, in at least two ways.
1) Each discrepancy would exactly equal one of the transaction amounts.
2) Many transactions would have included payment of gas bills, etc etc. Had the money been pinched, then there would be a shortfall on the other side.
WTAF??
CW has a damn good record of such investigations – even won prizes for it. Quite why the IT lead wasn’t told to publish a personal rebuttable and/or give CW an interview to clean up the mess in response and watching to see how much he squirms before seppuku I have no idea – well I guess I do now PV!
PO was either insanely bad at specifying or fleeced – non repudiable transaction systems were pricey but entirely understood by then.
A little thing that worries at me is the Civil Service appointee to the board – which is done to keep a government eye on them for this sort of thing, appears to have also been paid by the PO for the role which would be a blatant conflict of interest.
@Western Bloke
People in the public sector don’t test software enough. And this comes down to a fundamental problem that none of them stand to lose much.
This is the entire problem with the public sector, in all areas.
Jack C raises a good point there. If you’ve got a transaction like paying a gas bill going through & it’s duplicated, then the gas supplier must receive two remittances under the same payment number. So the payee should have a credit on their account. If their wasn’t a remittance, then no money has been drawn on the PO & there shouldn’t be a shortfall. Any shortfall has to show up as a credit somewhere else.
It seems that the branch attempts a transaction and transfers a sum £X to HQ.
As Tim says there is a breakdown somewhere: they were probably using telephone lines. The transaction fails and nothing is received at the HQ end. The branch computer retries and each time cumulatively debits its local account instead of voiding the previous transaction. Usually systems try three times.
So the local computer is down 3x£X, the HQ has £0 and the subpostmaster banks the original £X without noticing. What is unforgiveable is that if the transaction eventually succeeds, the branch computer still appears to debit the money each time. So HQ will have £X but the branch computer might be down £X or 2x£X.
What my missus used to write were transactions called “Two Phase Commit”. Here a transaction is only completed when the HQ host has sent an acknowledgement to the branch that it has received and booked the money. It is used wherever there is interbank or a branch and HQ structure involving money ( she specialised in insurance companies ). She even wrote one for the Austrian Socialist Party.
This is the thing that so frustrates me about so much testing. I was up until 4am last night chasing down an irregularity to track down exactly what was failing in order to a) confirm the flaw was actually happening, b) confirm it was in the module I was calling and not in my own code calling it, and c) create a repeatable demonstration to clearly demonstrate what the flawed action was doing. I come across so much stuff with flaws that
couldshould have been caught so easily.And the information transmission and acknowledgement problem is so well known and has been around for so long, it’s sometimes called Caesar’s Generals Problem, and Caesar himself created a workable work-around.
This is such fundamental remote transaction theory that I was dealing with it in computer networking about four years before going to university. I have my head in my hands that *adults* were *being* *paid* to write such literally fundamental crap.
“With prosecutions approaching one for every ten post offices the question should have been asked what was wrong with the recruitment process to attract so many dishonest workers.”
Forget questioning recruitment, ask why so many formerly honest postmasters had suddenly became rampant thieves a few months after a new computer system had been introduced. And also why so many rampant thieves were apparently voluntarily ringing the helplines to notify the PO of their own thieving. I mean you might expect a few brazen fraudsters to try stealing money then ringing up to complain ‘the computer isn’t working’, but hundreds and hundreds of them using exactly the same MO over decades? It just doesn’t pass the smell test.
“So the local computer is down 3x£X, the HQ has £0 and the subpostmaster banks the original £X without noticing. What is unforgiveable is that if the transaction eventually succeeds, the branch computer still appears to debit the money each time. So HQ will have £X but the branch computer might be down £X or 2x£X.”
So how exactly did the PO think the fraud was supposed to work? How was the fraudulent postmaster benefiting from his or her crime? The local computer was down £X, where had that money gone? Surely if the PM had withdrawn it elsewhere there would be a record?
Time for the lady’s toenails to be trimmed, methinks. Up to her chin…
So basically the fraud was just a switch. The branch computer says it has sent the money, the HQ has not received it. It is still physically there in the branch but the branch computer says it isn’t. Postmaster pockets the difference.
It is only spotted when the branch is audited, I guess.
Remember, these are the best and the brightest of the postal system.
And they are at about the same level as the best and brightest in the U.S. postal system.
Government: Where idiots congregate.
Put not your trust in a Woman of God
Was she ordained before or after fucking up the Post Office?
I seem to remember that Gordon Brown was nicknamed Macavity for his ability to avoid responsibility for various disasters. However, he obviously wasn’t very good at that as otherwise he wouldn’t have been tagged.
I looked through these comments for the name of a much more successful “Macavity” but “Blair’s not there”.
As with so many disasters of the past 27 years, the PO calamity began with Blair. He insisted – for short term political reasons – that the PO take Horizon because Fujitsu threatened otherwise to leave the UK. The PO didn’t want it but Blair made them take it. The problems with Horizon seem so profound that the best solution would have been to reject and build a new working system. However, once Blair had lumbered the PO, it would have been a “courageous” (in a “Yes Minister” sense) CEO who demanded it be junked.
Making Vennels the scapegoat for the PO’s failings is like blaming Sunak for the current state and prospects of the Tory party. While neither did anything to improve the situation they found themselves in – and both made things worse – in the terms of a 1970s joke, they found themselves staring at a package at the end of a game of pass-the-parcel in a Belfast pub.
Vennels become CEO in 2012; sub-postmaster convictions started in 1999. She was preceded by 4 or 5 CEOs who started and continued the process, all apparently completely and unquestioningly trusting the IT and accounting systems and so going ahead with the prosecutions. I’m not sure that she’s much more or less guilty than her equally incurious predecessors and successors.
And Sunak is the culmination of a line which began with Major and each Con PM (and LotO) along the way has made important contributions to the possible July 4th ELE.
What surprises me – or should do – is that no defence lawyer had the gumption to call on the Computer Weekly reports to demonstrate the unreliability of the accounting system and so get their client discharged.
I suppose lawyers are a bit like Guardian journalists but with added fees. Not good with numbers and not allowed to take their socks off in court.
Operation Ore was like that. All these guys charged and convicted with child porn offences, but one chap could prove that it wasn’t him, because all the IP addresses involved were based in Brazil. It never occurred to the lawyers in any other case to get an expert in to counteract the perjury of the police’s “expert”.
My experience, and let me add that this is civil not criminal (and certainly not mail fraud let alone Operation Ore-related sick nastiness) is that if you have a legal problem, you better mug up, very quickly, on both the technicalities of your situation and the law, both statutory and case law, that applies to it.
Because your lawyer sure as hell isn’t going to know the former, and to the extent they know the latter are going to struggle to apply it to your situation.
As much as you occasionally need one, never leave yourself in the hands of a lawyer, not even your own.
What I don’t get is that it’s all down to errors in Horizon, whereas we know that some bloke in Fujitsu can just alter the figures as he/she/it/they see fit. Surely there’s the chance that somewhere there’s a bad apple in the Post Office with a chum in Fujitsu, and some big bank balance between them?
Never mind the technicalities (interesting though they are), if you’re the boss and things go pear-shaped you do not blame your staff, you take the hit. That is what you’re paid for. It’s Management 101, even at the lowest level.
The woman’s a disgrace.
EM
There’s every chance and moreover some postmasters were nicking from their employer. Problem is, that the whole thing is now completely bolloxed up. It will take literally forever to review every case and decide which is an Horizon faultand which is straight up fraud. To do so will also be a PR disaster after all this inquiry lark.
” If you’re the boss and things go pear-shaped you do not blame your staff, you take the hit. That is what you’re paid for. It’s Management 101, even at the lowest level.”
Not if you’re a woman, then its always someone else’s fault, almost certainly a man.
Where did money go?
Bumper Post Office profits paid for bumper bonuses
Dumb, Dishonest Poiticians:
“A member of the government seeking legal advice from the Post Office’s top lawyer on whether or not the High Court could “protect” the Post Office from journalists “overstating” evidence?
What was he hoping might happen? And how? It really does beggar belief”
Vennells Day 2:
Dispatches from the Bunker
Towards the end of former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells’ second day of evidence at the Inquiry, we got a weird insight into the delusional mentality running rampant at the very top of the organisation during this period
Vennells Day 2: Cover-up finally acknowledged
Giving off “signals” evidently did not involve handing over or even divulging the existence of the Clarke Advice. That is not right and honest behaviour. That is wrong and dishonest behaviour. It is a cover-up
All testimony Here
Acoording to the Guardian the inquiry has been unable to find Mike Young, which is bizarre given he is active on LinkedIn (2nd in my network).
Have you all noticed by the way that Vennels was not wearing any make up ?
Not even lippy ?
“Have you all noticed by the way that Vennels was not wearing any make up ?
Not even lippy ?”
And the significance of this is?
Significance is she’s pplaying ‘poor wretched me’ pussy pass
The problem with designing software is that the people who know what it needs to do, know nothing about writing software and the people who write software don’t understand what the software needs to do. It is no surprise that systems often don’t work well.
Latest on bag lady Vennells
Paula Vennells and Mark Davies: Led by the (brown) nose
On 17 Dec 2014 Vennells celebrated Davies’ professional skill and her own much-vaunted integrity and care. Vennells declared a recently-broadcast One Show film on the suffering of prosecuted, hounded and sacked Subpostmasters had left her “bored”
One too many ” in html, sorry
Fix:
https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/paula-vennells-and-mark-davies-led-by-the-brown-nose/