A Japanese public information image
The FT has published a thoughtful article about the damage that Mr Bates v the Post Office is doing to Fujitsu – both in the UK and in Japan.
It concludes
While some investors view faults with the Horizon system as a legacy issue, Atsushi Osanai, a professor at Waseda Business School, warned that the scandal was still very much alive. “Whether Fujitsu can respond to this problem carefully from the viewpoint of moral responsibility will have an impact on Fujitsu’s brand as a whole,” he said.
Horizon was repurposed for the Post Office, it was originally designed to manage our social security system and was dumped by the then DSS at a cost of £720m back in 1999.
Having lost its first customer, the Government owned Post Office turned out to be the consolation prize. The reason Horizon was dumped by the DSS was that it was not fit for its wider purpose, Fujitsu’s European CEO has now admitted to parliament
“All bugs and errors have been known at one level or not, for many, many years. Right from the very start of deployment of the system, there were bugs, errors and defects, which were well known. To all parties,”
“All parties” did not include the sub-postmasters, the users of Horizon as an accounting system. It won’t escape reader’s notice that Government had a common interest in Horizon and its ongoing relationship with Fujitsu is now coming under scrutiny.
The part the British Government has played in this is significant and we shouldn’t look at other’s specks without acknowledging our logs
The Japanese in the UK
In the 1990s , Japanese financial institutions – Nomura, Yamaichi, Daiwa and Sumitomo were enormously powerful in the City. Some still are. Having worked at Gissings at the time , I saw how the Japanese management operated a “hands off” policy, much as overseas potentates do with Premier League football clubs.
I would not say that this led to corruption , but it did allow certain practices to grow up within the financial institutions I worked with, which would not have been tolerated where a more hands on approach to top-down governance existed.
The FT article hints at the dangers of such an approach.
UK Post Office scandal exposes risks of Fujitsu’s hands-off approach
Even to this day, we regard Japanese technology as a thing apart, we may no longer have SONY as our go to consumer brand but firms such as Fujitsu still command a respect that stems from Japan’s pre-eminence in consumer electronics in the late 20th century.
The Japanese in the UK have remained mysterious to us, the Fujitsu scandal may have wider repercussions in terms of brand . But we should not allow prejudice born of ignorance to become xenophobia.
Appetite to continue in the UK
My impression of the Japanese corporate culture is based on its immense pride in its own dignity. The local Brit would unwittingly insult Japanese executives in all manner of ways, to a point that a local industry existed in the City , teaching us the conventions of dealing with visiting Japanese executives.
The calamity of reputational damage is felt very deeply by Japanese senior managers, firms like Toshiba have proved toxic. It is important for the future of our relationship with Japanese companies in the UK , that we do understand the delicate balance that the hands off approach has required.
Paradoxically, Fujitsu may need more support from the UK than punishment. Recognising that there is genuine remorse from Fujitsu , may be in the interests of all. A simple blood-lust for revenge is likely to jeopardise corporate relations for generations to come.
Now is the time for the UK to accept the offers of compensation being put forward by Fujitsu and to cement not just Fujitsu’s but Japan’s ongoing support for the UK.
We are not so strong in ourselves as to lose an important trading partner. We should not look remorse like a gift horse. We should recognise that Japan , for its many faults, is one of the few trading partners we have outside of Europe whom we have an easy working relationship.
Let’s make sure we keep it that way , without compromising our reputation for fairness, decency and humility.
In the 1980s, I worked on the development of a very large computer system. New versions of that underwent extensive testing and were only released when there were no critical bugs and there were less than a thousand known lesser ones. Many of the lesser bugs would never be fixed. It would always be more important to the user business to get new features in a subsequent version of the software than to put effort into fixing all the smaller problems in the existing version.
There is no reason to believe that this has changed in any fundamental way. Any large computer system will be littered with bugs, no matter who developed it.
I find this to be a particularly unusual slant about not disrespecting Fujitsu or the Japanese. What on earth has that got to do with anything? The UK head honcho of Fujitsu, Paul Patterson, has admitted last week in the enquiry, that Fujitsu are morally obliged to contribute to the cost of compensation for the innocent victims of the Horizon scandal. Fujitsu senior executives absolutely clearly must have known that there were definite faults with the system, and therefore absolutely clearly made a conscious decision to cover it up, probably along with senior Post Office executives. There is no way a lowly Fujitsu call centre manager somewhere made a unilateral decision to get the helpline support staff to tell each caller that there were no known bugs and that they were the only one experiencing problems balancing. This was corporate corruption on a mass scale. Every system has bugs, but not every company chooses to cover the problems up in such a way as to lead to the unjust prosecution and conviction of thousands of innocent people. Quite who are the specific executives at the Post Office and Fujitsu who conspired to defraud postmasters out of millions of pounds, and who conspired to allow innocent people to go to jail and be fined tens of thousands of pounds, well that is for the enquiry to help determine. Also, hopefully there will be criminal prosecutions of actual people rather than just Fujiitsu and the Post Office as organisations. It is actual people who decided on the policy of prosecuting innocent victims. And it is actual people who need to be identified as culpable, and who need to be prosecuted. If necessary they need to have all of their assets taken and to be made bankrupt, not for revenge, but because they should pay for the costs incurred as a result of their criminal decisions. I would never disrespect any person or company because of their nationality, but I would never give respect to any person who is not worthy of respect.
What a terrible take this writer has of not holding people and corporations accountable for their horrendous mistakes, the covering up of the mistakes, then watching people go to jail, committing suicide and going bankrupt.
The very idea that we must bend over for some country’s cultural sensibilities over what one of their major firms has done to British citizens lives is just woke madness in my view.
The Japanese culture of we’re right and how dare you criticize us or we’ll get upset is laughable. This writer has got it wrong and if these abuses had happened to him he’d be crying to his lawyers in a heartbeat. Oh but the people abused, convicted, jailed and deceased should just take the peanuts offered and get over this? Until the people behind the software and the post office suffer criminal sanctions and financial fallout – it will be business as usual.
The fact that so many Tories had connections to the firm involved means the MET won’t find enough evidence to charge anyone criminally. Oh but we shouldn’t insult the Japanese? Their culture of not questioning authority led to this. Work in any Japanese firm and you will SEE that bottom up criticism is not wanted and not rewarded. In fact you’ll be shown the door. This is the root of the problem – failure to question authority and a fear of pointing out flaws. We heard that over and over from the Horizon tech support people. The Japanese bring their ‘culture’ to US to make money from US and we are not supposed to question their morality? You couldn’t be more out of touch if you tried.