On January 1, 2024, the British television station ITV launched a self-made drama series "Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office". The absurdity of the plot ignited British public opinion. What's even more absurd is that this TV series is adapted from real events. After the episode aired, as of January 9, more than 100 victims in the UK had contacted relevant lawyers, demanding a retrial of their cases or compensation.
This good drama is the famous "Post Office Scandal" in Britain. In the 1990s, the British Post Office purchased a Horizon accounting system from ICLPathway, a subsidiary of Japan's Fujitsu Group. The software continued to have errors over the past two decades, resulting in more than 900 deputy postmasters being prosecuted for financial problems, and some even had to commit suicide to prove their innocence.
It was not until 2019 that a British court formally determined that the Horizon software was faulty, and that the British Post Office began to settle with the hapless deputy postmasters. To this day, wronged postal workers continue to appear in court, demanding justice.
However, what is even more ridiculous is that in April last year, the British Post Office stated that due to economic and technical problems, the Post Office would continue to pay 16 million pounds to renew the contract with ICLPathway.
This outrageous development even made British Prime Minister Sunak have to doubt his life. On Wednesday, Sunak announced new legislation to absolve wrongly convicted Post Office executives and provide some with £75,000 in upfront compensation.
The British government began to review Fujitsu's contract and found a deeper black hole. In English proverb, "the bottom of the cupboard may have been crawling with rats." Not only is the Post Office trapped in Horizon, other agencies of the British government also have close technical cooperation with Fujitsu.
Some MPs are already feeling numb because the British government seems unable to clean up such a huge mess. So they targeted Fujitsu and demanded direct compensation from the company. But Fujitsu, far across the ocean, remained silent.
This matter continues to ferment, and more and more British people feel heartbroken after watching TV: This soap opera is so realistic that it makes people "break their guard".
The horizon is not flat
In August 1994, the British government proposed a project called Pathway and invited bids from major companies. The then Social Security Secretary Peter Lilley announced in Parliament the following year that this would help computerize post office benefit payments in the UK.
According to Lilley, the Pathway project will reduce welfare fraud by up to £150 million a year and improve efficiency at post office counters, costing the government £1.5 billion. ICLPathway, majority-owned by Fujitsu, became the contractor on the contract and began developing the Horizon software.
In 1999, a software called Horizon was launched and began to be implemented in the British Post Office. By August 2000, the system had been rolled out to 10,000 branches.
The British Post Office thought that the products of efficient, cautious and humble Japanese companies would bring new horizons to the entire post office system. However, the reality is that the managers of post office branches began to suffer from bad luck.
Within a few weeks after the Horizon system was installed, post office branch directors kept reporting on the hotline that they could not balance their accounts. However, the post office refused to accept the reports from the directors on system failures and instead forced the deputy directors to fill the accounting gaps themselves.
Some deputy directors managed to make up for the shortfall through their own property or borrowed money, while others faced greater disasters. In 2000, six deputy directors were accused of shortfall crimes, in 2001 the number rose to 41, and in 2002 there were 64.
The independent investigation company SecondSight was commissioned by the Post Office to conduct a third-party investigation in 2012. However, then Post Office CEO Paula Vennells later recalled that the report concluded that no evidence of Horizon system breaches was found.
Ron Warmington of SecondSight gave a completely different answer, saying that in its first interim report, the post office admitted that Horizon did have software flaws, but that the system was still effective.
The investigation found that between 2011 and 2012, the post office discovered two flaws that resulted in errors in 76 branches. The largest financial shortfall erroneously reported by the software was up to £9,800, while the largest financial surplus was £7,044.
The terrible thing is that this mistake is not deeply understood. Hundreds of deputy postmasters say they continue to report problems but are ignored. Because of the system they have been forced into tens of thousands of pounds of debt, some have lost their jobs, some have been separated, some have been jailed and at least four have committed suicide.
The tragedy of pride
Before the introduction of the software system, the British Post Office was deeply involved in corruption problems caused by manual accounting. This also led to some senior officials to draw arbitrary conclusions too quickly when dealing with the Horizon issue, leading to tragedies for hundreds of people.
Vennells, the former CEO of the Post Office, spoke about third-party reporting in 2020. Although she still believed that the Horizon system had no problems in the report, she said that the Post Office should consider its procedures and operational support for deputy directors in certain areas.
SecondSight's Warmington was much more straightforward, criticizing that if the post office believed and acted on the content of the report instead of being led by its own middle management, huge financial losses and numerous employee tragedies would have been avoided.
In addition to self-confidence, the post office's work also has a distinct gray color. The Post Office used the SecondSight report to prove to the British Parliament that it had had a third party verify the reliability of its financial system. The original report, which criticized software problems and pointed out the injustice faced by deputy governors, was actually retracted by the Post Office itself.
In 2015, British media pointed out that the day before the final report was released, the Post Office had ordered SecondSight to end the investigation and destroy all documents that had not been handed over.
The Post Office later rejected efforts to establish an independent commission on the Horizon incident and to mediate with deputy commissioners. The Post Office maintains that SecondSight's investigation was thorough and informative, and it has confirmed that there are no systemic issues with the Horizon system and related processes.
What is intriguing is that during the more than two decades of Horizon controversy, Fujitsu still gradually became the British government's second-largest information technology service provider, and in many cases was the British government's preferred service provider, winning most contracts including the Inland Revenue Department, the Ministry of Defense and the National Health Insurance System.
belated legal verdict
The prototype of the protagonist of the TV series, Alan Bates, who was the postmaster of Craig-y-Don branch, kept reporting problems while working at the post office, but was ignored by the post office. In 2003, he was terminated from his contract by the post office, but the strange feeling always lingered in his mind.
By 2009, Bates had collected a large amount of evidence and formed an organization with others - the Deputy Postmasters Justice League, which kicked off the deputy chiefs' arduous search for the truth.
It was not until December 2019, after the court ruling, that the British Post Office admitted that there were major flaws in the Horizon software. Vennells, then CEO of the Post Office, formally apologized to all employees affected by the scandal.
She emphasized that Fujitsu's top management had always told her that, like any IT system, Horizon was not perfect and had a limited service life, but its functions were basically sound. The results she got from repeated communications within the post office were consistent with what Fujitsu told her: without the deputy directors knowing, the system could not remotely change branch records. This was an important reason to sue the deputy directors.
555 deputy postmasters won a class action lawsuit, and the post office subsequently instituted a gap plan to compensate deputy postmasters who did not participate in the class action. Later, the British Post Office continued to receive more than 2,400 claim applications.
But as of February 2022, the 555 deputy directors who filed the lawsuit have still not received adequate compensation. The group received a compensation of 57.75 million pounds, but its legal expenses accounted for about 46 million pounds, which is equivalent to each person receiving only 20,000 pounds in compensation. By March 2022, the government stepped in and provided 555 deputy directors with the same level of compensation as other deputy directors.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, and the number of victims of the post office scandal is virtually impossible to fully account for. To this day, there are still people who wake up from a dream and begin to realize that the source of their inexplicable losses is an accounting software called Horizon.
In May 2021, the British government announced a long-term investigation into the Post Office scandal to compensate the victims as much as possible. In February 2022, at a hearing, a deputy director who was charged and jailed but later acquitted painfully expressed the hope that those people would be charged and imprisoned like him. This resonated with several other deputy directors.
The more I check, the more desperate I become
The 2019 court ruling urged the British government and society to take a closer look at Fujitsu. As a result, the closer they looked, the more the British felt suffocated.
Since 2012, Fujitsu has earned almost £7bn from 200 IT contracts awarded by the UK government. After the Horizon scandal was set in 2019, Fujitsu still received 4.9 billion pounds of orders from the public sector. Just three weeks ago, the Northern Ireland education sector signed a management system contract worth £485 million with Fujitsu.
Currently, Fujitsu has around 43 contracts in operation, worth £3.6 billion. These include Horizon, the UK government's flood warning system, the UK Police Data System and the National Alert System, launched in March last year.
British media pointed out that the reason why Fujitsu is still so active is that it is on the British government's priority contractor list for the framework agreement and has obtained government contracts through the "VIP" channel.
Opposition Labor MP Liam Byrne pointed out that Fujitsu's access to new contracts must now be suspended until all the truth is found out. Another Labor MP, Kevan Jones, also called for the UK not to allow Fujitsu to win any new contracts until the company explains its role in the scandal.
This is undoubtedly a huge political pressure for Sunak’s Conservative Party. But given that Fujitsu is so deeply entrenched in the UK's public sector system, the UK government now faces the hellish conundrum of "removing the elephant in the room without damaging the room".
Ministers are trying to prevent Fujitsu from getting more contracts, but it is almost impossible, a Conservative MP has revealed. He said that now he can only rely on Fujitsu's sense of honor to compensate the deputy postmasters.
The post office in "Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office" undoubtedly set a fire on the British government. The government is struggling to respond to questions such as whether it will stop Fujitsu's new orders, whether it will convict Fujitsu, and whether it will require Fujitsu to compensate.
Fujitsu said in a statement that it was understanding the situation and apologized profusely to the postal employees and their families. The company will fully support the investigation but will not comment further out of respect for the investigative process.
At present, deputy chief ministers are receiving compensation of 75,000 pounds each, and the Sunak government has allocated up to 1 billion pounds for this purpose. But Bates, a victim leader, said that this amount of money is not enough to compensate many people, and many people have not yet received final compensation, and the end of victory is still far away.