WE ARE A MAGAZINE ABOUT LAW AND JUSTICE | AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO
February 10 2025
WE ARE A MAGAZINE ABOUT LAW AND JUSTICE | AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO

Post Office gave bonus contract to Fujitsu despite data risk

Post Office gave bonus contract to Fujitsu despite data risk

Whistleblowers have revealed that Paula Vennells, the former Post Office CEO, gave Fujitsu a bonus contract to archive branch data, despite warnings that this would destroy key audit data.

To save money, the Post Office’s archive was ‘migrated’ from Centera, a ‘gold standard’ external storage system, to Eternus, the new Fujitsu system. Data previously stored on Centera was immutable, but Eternus did not have the same level of security. Consequently, executives had raised concerns that in the event of a forensic audit, it would be virtually impossible to investigate branch transactions in the Fujitsu system.

As explained by a Post Office source, “Centera retains all the history, full history, for audit purposes of all the data, meta data, full transactional use, all time- and date-stamped, along with any user data, logins etc.”. Conversely, “Eternus just stores the raw data, so it could be modified and manipulated as if stored in an open database, therefore the data has no integrity.”

This has sparked concerns about the reliability of Eternus data. A Fujitsu software engineer, Gerald Barnes, submitted to an inquiry in January that the Court of Appeal was given unreliable data last year, with 13 transactions recorded to be missing. Up till 2019, the Post Office and Fujitsu had made inaccurate claims that the transaction records on Eternus could not be changed remotely.

Concerns with Horizon had been previously raised in an independent investigation by forensic accountancy firm Second Sight. The firm preliminarily found that the Post Office had “failed to identify the underlying root causes of shortfalls before commencing civil and criminal proceedings” but was barred from further looking into audit and investigative processes.

This recent revelation is just one of multiple damning allegations in the ongoing Horizon scandal, in which nearly 900 postal workers were wrongfully convicted due to faulty IT software in the Horizon system. Since 2021, an inquiry into the scandal has unearthed attempts by the Post Office to deliberately cover up problems with Horizon. The public inquiry is still ongoing

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