• filister@lemmy.worldOP
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    7 months ago

    This whole Horizon IT scandal is so dystopian and I am to this date amazed they didn’t sue the shit out of their management.

    Imagine how many people were wrongly convicted just because your software was shitty and buggy. How many lives have been ruined?

    • intrepid@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      They are suing them. It’s just that the courts aren’t as enthusiastic about dispensing justice in case of the executives as they were with the sub postmasters.

      • baru@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        It’s just that the courts aren’t as enthusiastic about dispensing justice

        In Netherlands there was a system which was supposed to indicate if you maybe committed fraud regarding taxes and benefits. That system was completely buggy, plus highly biased. People went to the highest courts to prove their innocence and the courts rather trusted the tax authority, which trusted the system.

        Children were taken away from families, people lost their jobs, etc. This for around 100.000 people/families.

        The government knew and ignored that things were going wrong. A cabinet fell, people voted for the same people, pretty much the same cabinet was installed again.

        I wrote this from memory, there’s a Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scandal?wprov=sfla1

        It went on for ages. People are still heavily affected. Most haven’t been helped. It is one of the many scandals as a result from a majority voting for the same right wing party. People were sold that all these problems were due to left wing parties, now there’s an even more extreme right wing parties trying to form a cabinet. Because obviously it wasn’t right wing enough. Urgh.

    • JoBo@feddit.uk
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      7 months ago

      It was known that the software was shitty and buggy before it was foisted on the Post Office, having been rejected by DWP (and the Post Office right up until they were given no choice). It was Blair’s decision, he didn’t want to upset Fujitsu or discourage investment from Japan.

      Short and long versions of a report into that on the JFSA website.

      Pressure from govt to pretend that it worked, and to make the business profitable for privatisation, caused this inhuman clusterfuck.