Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/03/fujitsu-expert-helped-post-office-falsely-convict-countless-postmasters-in-it-scandal.html
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There’s your problem. Probably separate stacks of tech-debt combined into a far greater stack, and one which no one on either side of the merger has complete understanding of the whole thing.
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And yet, what still haunts every Post Office receipt when you mail something… ‘Horizon Certificate of Posting’.
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I wonder how much of neo-liberalism’s failures come down to businesses, institutions and states themselves being locked inside sprawling bespoke Enterprise Resource Planning systems that turn out to be homespun dogshit made by unreliable gods.
Neoliberalism, operating on highly flawed premises to begin with, requires magic-bullet tech and wizards to cover for the fact that it can’t deliver better than standard capitalism or other alternatives.
A brand-new custom ERP rushed into operation may not work better than a modified or re-configured set of proven off-the-shelf solutions, but it will generate more profits for the developers and more promotions and adulation for star-system consultants like this. As time goes by, those two goals supercede any mission the project might have. That approach can have literally fatal results, as it did in Post Office scandal.
Sometimes a custom system is warranted, but that’s exactly when the extra care and time that’s anathema to “move fast and break things” neoliberalism/Californian Ideology should kick in.
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[quote=“beschizza, post:1, topic:278295”]
I wonder how much of neo-liberalism’s failures come down to businesses, institutions and states themselves being locked inside sprawling bespoke Enterprise Resource Planning systems that turn out to be homespun dogshit made by unreliable gods.
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A special irony of convergent evolution is that ERP is basically the same impulse behind a planned economy, just approaching from below rather than above; but converging if conducted on too large a scale or with a bit too much state backing.
This isn’t to imply that you can just YOLO-invisible-hand all your work; as everyone who has ever enjoyed an executive function disorder knows you need to do some planning and coordination; but it’s not all that hard(as in this case) to basically “much privatization, such efficient, wow!” your way right back to an out-of-touch central planning ministry totally losing site of the facts on the ground and then making up the difference in show trials of those who failed the metrics.
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There is a recent BBC movie starring Toby Jones called “Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office” about this debacle. My wife and I watched it on PBS Masterpiece (streaming) a few days ago. It’s a little treacly, but does dramatize the incredible injustice done to hundreds of postal workers who were ruined by massive corporate, state, technological, and judicial incompetence.
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There should be a snappy word for this kind of thing. Quantitive measures of personal validation as the institutional goal. Goodhart’s law as an intentional system of management. Gamification flatland. Plato’s Rave.
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It was great.
Did you notice that the postmaster people in it were Hobbits and the powerful people were Elves? It’s subtle enough that it’s perhaps just a kind of epic storytelling osmosis, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some intentionality to it. It’s a story set in that particular England.
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I’m afraid I didn’t notice that symbolism. Bates and his wife did have a home that was very like the Shire, though!
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This is an example of “code is law” taken to its logical end. Coming to everything in your life with the assist of “AI”. I don’t trust the thing I work on because it can’t catch all the edge cases. How can they let prosecution of people based on software decision without human in the loop to verify. /S Oh, missing the memo: human in the loop cost too much and will render the the system financially unsustainable. Saving the cost on labor and blaming mistake on algorithm, what not to like.
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What doesn’t get nearly enough attention is that Horizon was never intended as a point-of-sale application. It was a collaboration between the Post Office and the Benefits Agency (now part of the Department of Work and Pensions) to build a swipe card system for paying out benefits and pensions at Post Office counters.
The project started in 1996 but was cancelled in 1999 because it was so far behind schedule and there were inherent problems with its design. They had spent £700 million by this point, so they bolted on an electronic bookkeeping system and deployed it as the default accounting system in all Post Offices.
Just to give you an idea of how shabby this application is - here’s a bit of code submitted to the ongoing Inquiry:
Public Function ReverseSign(d)
If d < 0 Then
d = Abs(d)
Else
d = d - (d * 2)
End If
ReverseSign = d
End Function
The comment in the review is ‘Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understand of elementary mathematics or the most basic rules of programming.’
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Small point - but credit for this superb programme belongs to ITV not the BBC.
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Adding: Lots of similar examples over here: (including onebox failure 
)
https://www.thedailywtf.com/
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Being a liberal at heart, I would have hung and drawn them for using single character variable names, but there should be no mercy for people who write code like that.
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What the actual fuck?
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The single letter for simple transformation doesn’t bother me.
The rest of the function though? Or the fact it even exists? Where did they even find people to write code like that?
ETA: How do you get someone that knows d-2*d negates a positive but also doesn’t know it negates a negative and just reduces to -d which can be used wherever this function is???
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MY most charitable thought is that this was automatically translated code - bits of Horizon were written in old versions of Visual BASIC - but I don’t think even that could be that bad. An alternative is that the programmers were paid by the line of code. My third is that Fujitsu fattened their profits by employing the cheapest, least qualified programmers.
But the problems go right to the top. A senior developer told Computer Weekly (one of the big heroes alongside Private Eye in bringing this sorry story to light in the first place) that the project had:
“no design documents, no test documents, no peer reviews, no code reviews, no coding standards”.
And:
“Everybody in the building by the time I got there knew it was a bag of s**t”, he said. “It had gone through the test labs God knows how many times, and the testers were raising bugs by the thousand.”
And:
“To my knowledge, no one on the team had a computer science degree or any degree-level qualifications in the right field. They might have had lower-level qualifications or certifications, but none of them had any experience in big development projects, or knew how to do any of this stuff properly. They didn’t know how to do it.”
Oh and for anyone who needs to catch up, the BBC Radio 4 Podcast The Great Post Office Trial is compulsory, often infuriating, occasionally heartbreaking, listening:
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I appreciate the correction – thanks! I just automatically associate the Public Broadcasting Company’s “Masterpiece” anthology series here in the U.S. with the BBC and failed to verify before posting.
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Lock 'im up!
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The “senior developer” quoted by Computer Weekly:
He concluded: “It was a prototype that had been bloated and hacked together afterwards for several years, and then pushed screaming and kicking out of the door. It should never have seen the light of day. Never.”
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