Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed

Senior Post Office staff – and those working for suppliers Fujitsu and ICL – knew or should have known about the defects causing errors in the Horizon system that contributed to the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of branch workers, 13 of whom committed suicide, most probably as a result, according to the first volume of a government report into the computer scandal.

The Post Office began rolling out the legacy Horizon IT system for accounting in 1999, which, along with its two subsequent upgrades, contributed to one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history.

The EPOS and back-end finance system was first implemented by ICL, a UK technology company majority owned by Fujitsu, in the 1990s and taken over completely by the Japanese giant in 1998. From 1999 until 2015, around 736 subpostmasters were wrongfully prosecuted and convicted of fraud when errors in the system were to blame, devastating lives ...