Post Office inquiry told that fixing bugs was too costly and time consuming

Inquiry also hears how data was manipulated before being used in criminal trials

The Post Office inquiry heard from two former Fujitsu staffers yesterday

A software developer at Fujitsu who raised the issue of bugs within the Horizon software that the Post Office rolled out from the late 1990's has told the inquiry into the Post Office scandal that the company did not fix the bugs because it was too expensive and too time consuming. It isn't the first time the inquiry has been made aware of damaging decisons being made due to worries about cost.

Gerald Barnes, a software developer at Fujitsu since 1998, worked on numerous technical tasks relating to the Post Office migration away from paper-based accounting methods to the automated Horizon IT system.

The inquiry heard that in 2008, a glitch in a system called CABSProcess, which was supposed to automatically summarise a post office's transactions at close of business, resulted in users having balancing issues.

Crucially, the system did not make post office operators aware of the problem.

"The failure was silent to the postmaster," Barnes said. "Although it was available [to Fujitsu] in the event log and to diagnosticians, the operator at the Post Office branch would not know anything had gone wrong."

According to an internal Fujitsu email, Fujitsu did not look to fix the issue due to its "rarity", but it eventually did when it became "a higher priority with the [Post Office]," when it appears to have emerged that the issue affected 195 branches.

Speaking yesterday at the inquiry Barnes said:

"We were just about to replace [legacy] Horizon with HNGx [Horizon Online.] The better thing to do is to make sure the [Horizon Online] software works. It would have just been too expensive to do a thorough job at that stage. It would have been uneconomic. To comprehensively rewrite the error handling would be a massive job. It would be extremely expensive."

In an internal message chain at the time, Barnes said: "I hope the [Horizon Online] version is much better."

In 2009, Barnes began working with the audit team responsible for gathering the data which was subsequently used in the trials of sub-postmasters. It was around this time that Fujitsu scrapped a third-party software program that had been in place to, among other tasks, help produce audit record queries (ARQs). This was in order "to save the licence fee", according to Barnes.

Fujitsu rewrote the code so that Horizon would handle this function but more bugs meant the ARQs did not provide complete information. Barnes said that in 2010, he worked on one such bug that caused multiple transactions to appear in a spreadsheet without it being clear that it was the same transaction being duplicated.

Email chains between Fujitsu management and its fraud and litigation team which have been presented to the inquiry have revealed that Fujitsu knew about a string of ongoing problems with ARQs that it did not disclose. The duplication of transactions was one such problem with as many as one-third of transactions being duplicated.

Further emails indicate that Fujitsu management knew that if this became public it would call into question the integrity of the data and therefore prosecution cases.

"If we do not fix this problem, our spreadsheets presented in court are liable to be brought into doubt if duplicate transactions are spotted," Barnes warned in an internal exchange in 2010. "There are a number of high-profile court cases in the pipeline and it is imperative that we provide sound, accurate records."

Filtered data

Also giving evidence to the inquiry yesterday was John Simpkins, a team leader within Fujitsu's software support centre (SSC).

Simpkins was questioned on the now well-known and controversial area of whether Fujitsu and/or the Post Office could access branch data without the knowledge of the sub-postmasters. The forensic accountants Second Sight, and indeed the BBC were told, repeatedly, by the Post Office that remote access was not possible.

Simpkins was shown a document in which an answer was formulated for a question posed by Second Sight, which was: "Can Post Office or Fujitsu edit transaction data without the knowledge of the postmaster?"

A formulated answer was then presented: "Neither the Post Office nor Fujitsu can edit transaction data without the knowledge of the sub-postmaster."

Simpkins failed to give a clear answer to the question posed by counsel to the inquiry, Jason Beer KC, on the accuracy of this formulated answer. Mr Beer KC persisted:

"So just answer my questions, in summary, ‘neither Post Office nor Fujitsu can edit transaction data without the knowledge of a sub-postmaster', is wrong isn't it?"

"I believe so," Simpkins said.

Simpkins also said that the team he worked in "downed tools" after learning the Post Office was using ARQ data which had been "manipulated from its original source" and presented to the Post Office in a "filtered" format before being used in criminal proceedings against the sub-postmasters.