Fujitsu "expert" helped Post Office falsely convict postmasters in IT scandal

The hundreds of British postmasters falsely convicted for stealing takings were the victims of a sequence of wrongs—a Post Office run by indifferent bean-counters, the abuse of its privilege to launch its own prosecutions, good old-fashioned lying and perjuring, laws that made it impossible to challenge false computer data, and so on. But at the source was Horizon, the bug-riddled point-of-business platform created for it by Fujitsu. One man responsible for all this, former Fujitsu engineer and "Horizon expert" Gareth Jenkins, testified last week at the UK's hearings on the scandal.

From 2005, Mr Jenkins was pivotal in helping the Post Office defend its faulty computer software system in criminal and civil cases. "He was the 'go to' Fujitsu expert on any question of its reliability," says David Enright.

In 2010, Mr Jenkins gave evidence in the trial of Seema Misra at Guildford Crown Court. She told the BBC: "I was naïve at that time. I thought it was a good thing that he was working for Fujitsu because he would know the system inside out. If anything was going wrong in Horizon, he would have seen it."

What Mrs Misra did not know was that shortly before the trial, Mr Jenkins had flagged a bug that affected dozens of branch accounts, and that he had suggested remotely accessing their computer terminals as one way of fixing the problem.

Mr Jenkins did not disclose this in court.Mrs Misra was found guilty of theft and false accounting and was sent to prison whilst pregnant.

If the problems had been revealed at the time, it could have stopped all the prosecutions in their tracks…

He had his say, and so did others.

A top lawyer working for the Post Office once described Gareth Jenkins as an "unreliable god", the inquiry heard.

One can read a more disdainful article about Jenkins, reportedly happy to charge thousands of pounds a day in consulting fees to help the Post Office off the clock it already paid for.

Fujtisu's "unreliable god" (in the words of Anthony de Garr Robinson) does not have a PhD – despite being erroneously described as Dr Jenkins in the first Clarke Advice and a number of Post Office documents. He does, however, have a maths degree from Cambridge. We found out today he was not and never has been a Chief Architect of Horizon, nor has he ever been Fujitsu's Lead Engineer on Horizon. In terms of his career, Jenkins joined ICL (which later became part of Fujitsu) on graduating in 1973 and in the 1990s was recognised as a Distinguished Engineer, an honorific title bestowed on him by Fujitsu.

My favorite bug is the one where if you had two or more terminals in an office they would not synch before settling up with the server, whose response messages might thereby create local accounting discrepancies. Horizon postmortems read like a learning journey through every logic bug inherent to accounting systems, courtesy of the lifer with a math degree in charge of making a very important one.

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.

Previously:
Public inquiry launched after 736 UK post office workers falsely convicted of fraud