Have you heard about this incredible and heartbreaking story about British postmasters? In the early 2000s the British Post Office used an IT company called Horizon to deal with their accounting for local post offices. Their software returned erroneous financial discrepancies, yet the Post Office accused over 900 subpostmasters of theft, fraud, and faulty accounting. Even though local store managers complained of the software errors, hundreds of subpostmasters were forced to pay back these supposed financial losses, forcing many into debt, bankruptcy, and prison. In 2017 a group brought a lawsuit against the British Postal Service, and it took many years in court to finally see some reparations. There’s a captivating TV series called “Mr. Bates vs the Post Office” that brought this scandal to public attention earlier this year, and the former Prime Minister called this one of the "greatest miscarriages of justice" in British history. Watch and learn about the perils of trusting a software program over human integrity.
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