“answer” you mean.
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I don’t see him in that light. Having worked with people with a broad range of abilities and talents, some of the most intelligent (and senior) can have material blindspots, especially when asked to go outside their comfort zones. This morning JB has established that GJ did receive via e-mail the instructions around his role responsibilities as an ‘expert witness’. By this test, most of the bosses I worked for were ‘guilty as charged’, as most of them could barely manage their e-mail flows, and would often skip/only skim attachments.
The we hear the mitigating aspects around this ‘finding’:
1- GJ wasn’t asked to provide such an ‘expert report’ in this case
2- when the same lawyer, who sent the ‘instructions letter’, prepared a draft witness statement for GJ to sign, none of the requirements reflected in this letter featured.
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Duly edited - thanks.
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Yes I see that, but I must apologise as I only “skim read” your response by reading one in every 3 words. I’m sure that isn’t important though.
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There is a delicious comment in that CW report:
<< When Thomson ended his evidence to the inquiry he wanted to say a few words, which triggered a mass exodus from the room.>>
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Jenkins continues not to impress 
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I need to read the expert report from Professor Ciprione which was referenced by Flora Page in her superb questioning, but as I read the extract she quoted they went live with an Accounting Integrity error rate of 0.06%, 1 in 1,700, which was an order of management better than the target. This was to be managed by processes.
If that is right and they were doing 6 million transactions a day (a figure I’ve seen several times) , there would be 3,500 accounting integrity issues a day. With a process efficacy of 99% which would be remarkably high that would be 35 unresolved issues a day, over 10,000 a year.
I’ve had similar high-faluting titles to Gareth Jenkins in my career. I was well aware that no system is perfect. I can’t help thinking that if I went into court as a witness I’d have had more that “informal conversations” about the system. A system working well can have occasional issues, when multiple people being prosecuted and claiming it was an issue with the system I’d have wanted to see the error logs and our analysis of the system to demonstrate that it wasn’t an intermittent issue before I went to court.
His defence as far as I understand it is one of complete incompetence. He believed in the system and never checked whether there were either silent events (code walkthrough for poor error handling) or whether errors generated in issues at rhe hundreds of affected post offices. And he still doesn’t seem to realise that you need to have done that due diligence before stating that the system was behaving well as continuing to claim that.
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OK, that seems quite good. But - does this include problems with Comms failures…? I believe I have read that one failure mode was when Comms failed, a Transaction could be entered twice…? Or perhaps not at all…?
It’s not a poor accuracy, but if you knew that your system was generating >10,000 accounting integrity errors (post process support) across your estate per annum, >1,000,000 per annum before process fixes, would you use that data alone to prosecute people without doing a deep dive each time?
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Clearly, POL decided - Yes.
They believed the system - Horizon - was always right. And the SPM’s were obviously at fault.
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The acceptance report showed the error rate I quoted above, the learned professor got the numbers from there. This was Horizon in the late ‘90s, not the later Horizon Online.
I accept I’m a numerate techie who would recognise that as an issue and that business managers would just see it as an accepted system, but surely somewhere in IT someone knew this and was screaming inside .
Did not GJ point out that the Prof’s report was before Horizon went fully live? There seem to have been many timing disconnects within the SI, where investigation timelines haven’t coincided with the timelines of the SPM’s cases – and GJ was sure any issues would have been ‘bottomed’ before ‘live release’.
…or were there many other things in play?
The Misra case is held up as a ‘test case’, but I haven’t heard/seen anything lays out what precisely went wrong in her PO shop? Same with Jo Hamilton?
I’ve listened off and on for three of the four days (not yet today’s session, which I probably won’t bother with).
GJ strikes me as not very senior in Fujitsu at all, but of course that doesn’t matter. I thought he was surprisingly naive, biddable, lacked curiosity, but worked hard in his silo and was quite overworked at times. I didn’t get much sense of empathy and even now he doesn’t accept much of the evidence about the system failing for its end users.
He worked in an organisation that didn’t train him for the role they put him in and the customer (lawyers mainly) successfully browbeat him constantly. He was not well supported by his own managers.
It will be interesting to see whether he ends up with a criminal conviction. I suspect many of his answers were guided by briefing from his own lawyer. I didn’t hear him rely on his privilege against self-incrimination, which was probably a good call I think.
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I’ve seen some of GJ today, he seems like a wheel in a cog and not really part of the wider picture
Hi Eoin, a very precise breakdown, I worked with actuaries , they would tell you with that degree of error then prosecutions would be very risky as there was an inevitability the innocent would be accused
It is clear there was very poor guidance from the lawyers
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Having watched quite a bit of the proceedings over the last month or so it is clear that top the bad guys list is the lawyers.
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The report quoted the acceptance document for the system that went live. So unless there was a software miracle that is what they launched with.
Given that the performance was well within acceptance criteria there’s no reason to believe that there was great focus on improving as it was fixed by “process”.
So multiple thousands of accounting integrity errors a year.
I haven’t seen anything about the accounting integrity of Horizon Online to work out the numbers.
On the Misra and Hamilton cases long answers below, the TLDR is in Misra’s case Jenkins admits he didn’t analyse half of the records he had, in Hamilton’s there appears to have been no system analysis done and a Post Office investigator who found no evidence of theft.
In the Misra case if I remember Jenkins’s Inquiry evidence correctly (it’s been 4 days of it) he had analysed less than half of the raw data he’d had extracted. So we have a system which can generate accounting integrity issues and the supposed expert witness (supposed because he claims not to know what an expert witness does) hadn’t analysed all of the underlying data. And someone went to jail.
In the Hamilton case I’m not sure if they even analysed the data. The investigator report makes no mention of any analysis, rather “ The report noted several things. Firstly that overnight, between the auditor doing an initial check and a subsequent check the next day, a mysterious £61.77 added itself overnight to Jo’s £36,583.12 discrepancy. As the auditor could not explain this, it was just added onto the amount Jo owed.
The investigator also wrote: “I was unable to find any evidence of theft, or that the cash figures had been deliberately inflated.””
We have heard several that the process was such that if your books didn’t balance then you had to sign them off or you couldn’t open the next day, and that the system would catch up. So in practice due to Horizon timing issues or errors sub-postmasters were being forced to commit false accounting.
We have heard that multiple SPMs were told that they’d be done for theft and go to jail , but if they admitted false accounting they wouldn’t get a custodial sentence.
So in the Jo Hamilton case there was a cash discrepancy (including a discrepancy which appeared overnight when nobody was there), an investigator who said he had no evidence of theft, no analysis of the system logs and someone manipulated into pleading guilty.
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Having listened to much of the last few days, my view remains as per post ~301, in that:
1- he volunteered absent any other willing volunteers within FJ (and I think he was truthfully of the view that Legacy Horizon was ‘robust’) and, if not, BEDs would be evident from the usual check, balances and controls established by FJ & POL. Strangely perhaps, I understand why he doesn’t recognise the accuracy of LJF’s GLO judgement, as he thinks LJF was technically incorrect.
However, in holding these views, he’s obviously hostage to other actors and operators within FJ and POL.
2- Having volunteered, he was never trained or properly informed as to his role, and severely let down by lawyers (FJ/POL/CK/BD) who never properly recognised his status as ‘expert’ in legal terms. Unquestionably, there was material ‘mission creep’ here. Remember, this is a computer boffin, exposed to a whole new way of thinking, where simple honesty and ‘good intentions’ weren’t enough – and expecting him to act in compliance with ‘Rules’ which he wasn’t fully tutored on (Tatford’s testimony questionable in this regard?) is farcical. It’s a massive clash of cultures for him.
3- AFAICS, he’s not benefited from any of this, quite the contrary – and if one sees a case to prosecute him, then the same must apply to everyone who has admitted shortcomings in decision-making and judgements at this SI (and some have been far more heinous IMV).
4- staying with his responsibilities, could he have ever been an ‘expert witness’ (?), as he’s clearly conflicted which can only colour his objectivity – and any semblance of this is usually avoided IME.
Here, the various lawyers have let him down badly, having failed to recognise his status before court, how they should have instructed him, and how they should have supported him.
How FJ’s management let him hang as their spokesperson by default is severely concerning - you would have thought all his outputs would have been at least double checked, but these were often requested only hours before court!? In truth, it was an impossible task – and, as Sir Wyn observed today, decisions to prosecute were taken before potential impacts of Horizon issues were examined.
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He looks like a lamb to the slaughter and you wonder who is hiding behind him?
He must be under enormous pressure