The Great Post Office Scandal

 

The Great Post Office Scandal by Nick Wallis is a depressing, dispiriting, and disheartening read. For anyone that cares about fairness and ethics in the relationship that business and technology has with individuals and wider society, at least.

As a software tester working in the healthcare sector who has signed up to the ACM code of ethics through my membership of the Association for Software Testing I put myself firmly in that camp.

Wallis does extraordinarily well to weave a compelling and readable narrative out of a years-long story with a large and constantly-changing cast and depth across subjects ranging from the intensely personal to extremely technical, and through procedure, jurisprudence, politics, and corporate governance.

I won't try to summarise that story here (although Wikipedia takes a couple of stabs at it) but I'll pull out a handful of threads that I think testers might be interested in:

The unbelievable naivety which lead to Horizon (the system at the heart of the scandal) being asserted to be working correctly on numerous occasions despite its huge size and complexity.

The extent to which this assertion is not questioned despite reports to the contrary and the sheer scale of the implementation and the number of transactions being processed making it statistically extremely unlikely even without the reports. 

The lack of visibility, oversight and audit trail for significant remote administrative operations on the local Horizon systems at local post offices.

The revelation that since 1999 in the UK there is a legal assumption that "mechanical instruments" are functional. This appears to include hardware, communications, and software systems of arbitrary complexity and so if "an IT system seemed to be working as it should, a defendant would have to prove that it wasn't" (page 122. I tried to look up the relevant change to legislation and think that this amendment is the one in which computer evidence becomes admissible without having to prove "proper use and operation.")

The unwillingness of the Post Office to look at, or even for, patterns in evidence that clearly pointed to a systemic issue with Horizon.

The power imbalance between those at the sharp end of the system, the practitioners with ground truth experience of its behaviour, and those with a vested interest in believing that there were no problems.

The dysfunctional arrangement between the Post Office and Fujitsu, the producer of the Horizon system. Contractually, the Post Office was discouraged from asking questions because it had to pay for each one and Fujitsu was discouraged from disclosing issues because of financial penalties.

The potential for distorted priorities when a contractor is building a system for a customer who is not the primary user and whose motivations are not aligned with those of the users.

The pre-existing disdain that the Post Office appeared to have for its sub-postmasters who run local post offices but are self-employed, and the callous way in which it pursued them aggressively through the courts for phantom losses.

The ways in which organisations can favour actions which appear to reduce their pain now, despite the multiplying risk of massive pain later and the collateral damage to those outside the organisation. When in the hole, don't just keep on digging: get a bigger spade.

The insufficiency of presenting the relevant data to the relevant people, sometimes. To be heard, a messenger might also need to create a context in which the relevant people are forced to listen. This is a social task and one that may involve pushing against considerable inertia.

The fact that all of this was done by people who, on the whole, would probably regard themselves as ethical individuals.
Image: Amazon