Sent To Jail Because of a Software Bug

First time accepted submitter toshikodo writes "The BBC is reporting a claim that some sub-post office workers in the UK have been sent to jail because of a bug in the accounting software that they use. The Post Office admits Horizon computer defect. I've worked on safety critical system in the past, and I am well aware of the potential for software to ruin lives (thankfully AFAIK nobody has been harmed by my software), but how many of us consider the potential for bugs in ordinary software to adversely affect those that use it?"

Comments

Private Eye / Nick Wallis's article

[alanw]

Private Eye, a fortnightly UK satirical and news magazine first raised this issue
almost two years ago. Here's a link to the journalist's blog article.

The summary isn't very good

[FuzzNugget]

To resummarize:

Sub-postmasters, for those who aren't aware, are private subcontractors of the UK postal system. They are not directly employed by the government, they operate as private businesses.

The UK requires them to use specific software, called Horizon, to manage all transactions and accounting.

This software had a pretty serious bug that resulted in wrongly calculated shortfalls into the thousands of pounds. Their contracts, however, stipulate that they must make up for shortfalls themselves. Doesn't matter if the software is wrong, that's what it says, that's what it is (sounds like government to me...)

This bug went unfixed for years, despite numerous complaints and reports.

Some postmasters started falsely reporting the shortfalls as the obviously miscalculated numbers climbed to ridiculous amounts (tens of thousands) that would put them out of business by the end of the day. Because falsely reporting accounting numbers is illegal (even though the "right" numbers are obviously wrong and completely not the postmasters' fault), some of them were sentenced to prison, most likely due to the strict, unwavering and unreasoning nature of law.

Basically, they were users self-correcting for what they knew was a flaw in the software they were forced to use, and they went to jail for it or otherwise paid dearly. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. All in all, a pretty deplorable miscarriage of justice.

Re:The summary isn't very good

[newcastlejon]

To resummarize:

Sub-postmasters, for those who aren't aware, are private subcontractors of the UK postal system. They are not directly employed by the government, they operate as private businesses.

The UK requires them to use specific software, called Horizon, to manage all transactions and accounting.

The Post Office is not state-owned.

FYI, the postal system in the UK was formally owned and operated by the state, but was split back in 1986 into Post Office Ltd and Royal Mail; the former was privatised. The Post Office operate the physical branches as well as selling some minor banking and telephony* services while RM, which is state-owned, deal with the actual delivery of mail. FWIW parts of my line of work would be much easier if the government actually did run the post offices.

*To make things more confusing, the old GPO also ran the telephones but that part was spun off into British Telecom long ago. Now the new Post Office also do telephony.

Re:Open Source...

[dkleinsc]

There's another option that open source gives you that proprietary software doesn't: You can pay someone else to fix it. If it's really that irritating to you, but you really don't want to work on it yourself, why not use some cash to convince a developer to fix your bug? You'll get what you want, the developer will get some cash, and the project will have its bug fixed. Everyone wins.

What you're really demanding is that volunteers do what you want them to do free of charge. What will actually happen is that volunteers will do whatever they damn well please.