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At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

(www.nytimes.com)
624 points xbryanx | 1 comments | 11 Jul 25 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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jordanb ◴[11 Jul 25 14:59 UTC] No.44532900[source]▶
I went on a deep dive on this scandal about a year or so ago. One thing that struck me is the class element.

Basically, the Post Office leadership could not understand why someone would buy a PO franchise. It's a substantial amount of money up front, and people aren't allowed to buy multiple franchises, so every PO was an owner/operator position. Essentially people were "buying a job".

The people in leadership couldn't understand why someone would buy the opportunity to work long hours at a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary at the end of the year. They assumed that there must be a real reason why people were signing up and the real reason was to put their hands in the till.

So they ended up assuming the postmasters were stealing, and the purpose of the accounting software was to detect the fraud so it could be prosecuted. When the accounting software started finding vast amounts of missing funds, they ignored questions about the software because it was working as intended. I bet if the opposite had happened, and it found very little fraud, they would have become suspicious of the software because their priors were that the postmasters were a bunch of thieves.

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ionwake ◴[11 Jul 25 15:29 UTC] No.44533278[source]▶
I found this comment insightful but I feel I must itirate ( maybe its not needed), that it is not "clear" if leadership were ignorant, as you said, ( though Im sure you are part right ), I have read that it was malicious leadership trying to protect their own asses as per another comment.
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horizion2025 ◴[11 Jul 25 18:11 UTC] No.44535306[source]▶
What I've seen so far suggest they were just ignorant and victims of confirmational bias etc. You can see that when they won some cases they wrote internally something to the effect of "Final we can put to rest all those concerns about these cases blablabla". So it became self-validating. Also the courts and defense lawyers didn't manage to the see the pattern and in the huge numbers of such cases. Each defendant was fighting their own battle. Also, a mathematician from Fujitsu gave "convincing" testimony they didn't have any errors. A lot was down to lack of understanding of how technology works. The fact that xx millions of transactions were processed without errors doesn't preclude that there could be errors in a small number, as was the case. In this case sometimes coming down to random effects like if race conditions were triggered.
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1. 7952 ◴[11 Jul 25 21:43 UTC] No.44537054[source]▶
Organisations can be fiendishly good at cultivating this kind of unaccountability. The software is managed by a contractor, maybe a project management company, a local PM team all of which focus on the performance of management and maybe budgets and timelines. Then you have some internal technical experts who just focus on the detail but have no influence on the whole. When things go wrong it is sent down a tech support ticketing system with multiple tiered defenses to deflect complaints. At some point it maybe gets to the point that an investigation is started. But obviously it needs to be done by someone neutral and independent who doesn't actually know the people involved or necessarily the technical details. And they are accountable not for outcomes but how closely they follow policy. A policy written by people outside the normal chain of command and no real skin in the game. At some point it reaches a legal team and then everyone else takes a step back. No one ever takes any responsibility beyond.an occasional case review conducted in a collegial atmosphere in a stuffy conference room by bored people. All the structures are put in place with good intentions but just protect people from actually having to make a decision and accept consequences. Except for the poor soul on the front line who only ever has consequences.