Tag: Post Office

The UK government pays out on Fujitsu scandal

Posted on September 19, 2023 by - News

The UK government announced that every postmaster convicted because of Fujitsu’s flawed Horizon IT system will be offered hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation.

More than 700 people running small local post offices were found guilty of false accounting and theft between 1999 and 2015 because the Horizon system insisted money was missing. The Post Office and Fujitsu made matters worse by not telling anyone that the software was turning up an unlikely number of criminals.

Reports from Computing Magazine at the time found IT workers in the Post Office and Fujitsu who knew the system was borked and had told their managers.

Some owners of local Post Office were imprisoned or left out of pocket after being asked to make up the shortfalls, while others failed to find other jobs and lost their homes.

Post Office and Fujitsu victims poles apart on compensation

Posted on May 4, 2022 by - News

The Post Office does not seem to want to pay out much cash in the Fujitsu scandal which saw it fire, bankrupt and give criminal records to its subpostmasters.

For those who came in late,  the Post Office went on a witch hunt of its subpostmasters after its Fujitsu computer incorrectly saw accounting errors where there were none. More than 700 former subpostmasters were convicted of crimes after being blamed for unexplained accounting shortfalls based on evidence from the Post Office’s Horizon retail and accounting system used in branches, which was later proved to be borked.

The Post Office after initially failing to acknowledge that its computer was faulty, now seems to be a little reluctant to pay up, meaning that judicial intervention is “inevitable” as compensation talks are breaking down.