Japanese technology giant Fujitsu is facing increasing pressure from UK political parties over its role in a scandal that has seen hundreds of post office owners prosecuted over accounting disputes.
But as Fujitsu has emerged as the star player in a saga that has spanned nearly a quarter of a century, the government has continued to hand the Japanese tech giant billions of pounds worth of contracts. one of its strategic supplierseven when a UK court found Fujitsu’s accounting software to be faulty and unreliable.
The British Post Scandal came back into the public consciousness last week after British broadcaster ITV’s four-part series, Mr. Bates v. the Post Officewhich tells how more than 700 sub-postmasters (Post Office beneficiaries) were wrongfully prosecuted for fraud, false accounting and theft over a 15-year period, with many imprisoned, losing their livelihoods and facing bankruptcy.
As it turned out, the “balancing” errors in the sub-directors’ books were due to a faulty IT system introduced by the government in 2000 to digitize welfare payments. The software, called Horizon, was developed by International Computers Limited (ICL), a British company that became wholly owned by Fujitsu in 1998before you become subsumed by the Fujitsu brand in 2001.
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A long-running campaign to secure justice for the convicted lieutenant governors was founded in 2009, with coalition members arguing that Horizon is responsible for the financial disputes. A lengthy, contentious independent private investigation concluded in 2015 with the Post Office itself concluding that there were no system-wide IT problems, resulting in Justice for Sub-postmaster Alliance to launch legal action, culminating in a £58 million settlement in December 2019 – and one Decision of the Supreme Court that the Horizon system was not robust or reliable.
Since the beginning of this year, the British Post Office scandal has dominated the headlines and public debate in the UK that it took a TV drama to generate this level of attention when the whole episode has been covered extensively in the media for many years, is perhaps a story in itself. But there are now fresh calls for Fujitsu to face justice, with MP (MP) and former home secretary Priti Patel calling in public to hold Fujitsu—and the Post Office—to account.
“It is clear that Fujitsu faces serious questions that require answering,” said Jonathan Reynolds, Labor MP and shadow secretary of state for business and trade. he told Parliament this week. “If it is found that Fujitsu knew the extent of what was happening, there should be consequences commensurate with the magnitude of the injustice.”
Politicians have asked company executives to participate at an evidence session in Parliament next week, with the chairman of the Commons Business and Trade Select Committee, Liam Byrne MP, saying it was “vital that Fujitsu admit how they got it so wrong”, questioning how the company could continue to undertake public sector contracts.
Indeed, despite the furore of recent years, the government awarded 107 contracts worth £4.5 billion to Fujitsu between January 2020 – after a British court had already expressed doubts about Fujitsu’s software – and the end of 2023, according to data provided to TechCrunch by a public sector market intelligence firm Tussell. The most recent contract involved a Northern Ireland Education Authority, which signed a £485m deal just three weeks ago for Fujitsu to support a new School Management System (SMS).
But incredibly, £2.4 billion of that money was allocated to the Post Office’s Horizon system itself, with Signed £36m extension just two months ago to keep things running until March 2025. The Post Office says it had planned to move to a new cloud-based infrastructure, but that it had faced significant technical challenges and had to stay with Fujitsu to manage the space infrastructure.
Some 24 years after the first condemnations of the Post Office that was based on Horizon software data, no one from Fujitsu was held accountable. The police have interview formerly Fujitsu employees for possible perjury in the original sub-postmaster trials, while a charter public inquiry into the Horizon IT system; is also underway from 2021.
What is clear from these past 10 days is that whatever investigations were already underway into the scandal, Fujitsu will now come under greater scrutiny — and all it took was a TV dramatization to make the public and politicians Really Care.
“The current Post Office Horizon IT statutory investigation examines complex events stretching back 20 years to understand who knew what, when and what they did with that knowledge,” a Fujitsu spokesperson said in a statement issued to TechCrunch. “The Inquiry has reinforced the devastating impact on the lives of postal workers and their families and Fujitsu has apologized for its role in their suffering. Fujitsu is fully committed to supporting the Inquiry in order to understand what happened and learn from it. Out of respect for the investigation process, it would be inappropriate for Fujitsu to comment further at this time.”
This article has been updated with comments from Fujitsu.
