Proceedings of the Castle Aching Parish Council, 1905

[Edwardian]

44 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

 

They bear some of the responsibility, it is said that the system has been upgraded, so work has been ongoing, the cost of bug fixes will have been borne by them.

 

The problem in dividing responsibility is how the system specification was developed, what user requirements, desired by the Post Office, were initially addressed and how many changes were subsequently required to provide additional functionality. Projects of all sizes suffer from feature creep which can have unexpected side effects. 

 

User training is another problem. Who was responsible, who created the user documentation and who implemented training programmes?  This can also be an area with dual responsibilities.

 

The Post Office, as the "employers" are getting it in the neck at the moment, I'm sure blame spreading for the Horizon system will ensue.

 

 

My experience of major software projects from a litigation perspective is that the customer's management team never adequately understands them, and they simply filter up the chain self-serving and increasingly asinine good news reports until whatever the Board receives is so simplistically high-level that it contains no information of value. That way, everyone involved internally looks good, until it goes wrong, and then they have a chain of reports that prove that, at any given stage in the chain of responsibility, no one had been told anything bad. 

 

On the supplier side, based on the press report, Fujitsu seems to have had its own way to filter out bad news, allowing problems to be denied and ignored.  

[CKPR]

23 hours ago, Annie said:

Bloody Hell!  I am completely appalled by what this woman has done.

Yet another example of the ambitious but mediocre failing upwards.

[Hroth]

57 minutes ago, CKPR said:

Yet another example of the ambitious but mediocre failing upwards.

 

It's the Peter principle, innit!

 

People in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence"

 

[Nearholmer]

About ten years ago, I had the “character building” experience of managing the client-side part of the IT component of a serious ‘business transformation’ project.

 

Possibly the most difficult thing I’ve ever overseen, mainly because it was incredibly difficult to measure progress in a meaningful way - it’s the sort of thing that makes running a ‘hard’ works programme seem easy. Even managing something like software-based control system development, which is pretty challenging, is easier than ‘business systems’.

 

We succeeded, but I swore ‘never again’ ..... definitely a job for other people!

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

Here in Australia we've had a similar scandal but one that is the reverse of the British case. 

 

A couple of years ago Australia Post (a statutory body) appointed a new CEO, a woman with considerable business skills Christine Holgate. She replaced a CEO who earned several millions in performance bonuses by cutting services and thus "saving" money.

 

The new CEO was searching to expand PO business (operated by franchisees) and hit on the lamentable fact that our banks are closing branches all over the place. This is a damned nuisance for a lot of people because Australia is a very big place, and country towns were losing local banks which resulted in people having to travel long distances to access banks for business or withdrawals etc. So Ms Holgate decided that as most Post Offices had rudimentary banking facilities due to a tie in with the Commonwealth Bank (another former government owned body) this portion of their business could be expanded so that Post Offices in now bank less towns could become local substitutes. It was, and is, a great idea and the franchisees supported it as did the general public.

 

However this expanded role required a specialist Post Office team to negotiate with the banks and set in place the expanded facilities. They did their job exceptionally well and as a result earned the right to performance bonuses (there were four members of this team) not exceeding $105,000 each. Seems high but the amount of business the new process brought in plus the convenience for locals who had been deprived of access to banks was inestimable. All round an excellent job.

 

However instead of paying out the bonus in cash to the the team the CEO actually asked them what they would prefer in the way of recognition. Surprisingly the team came back with a reply along the lines of "they were just doing their job" . So Ms Holgate decided that they deserved something and each of the four were presented with Cartier watches at a small fraction of the cost that would have been incurred if it had been a cash payment. So far so good, then the press got hold of it and the value of these Cartier watches began to inflate with each retelling of the tale. Our idiotic Prime Minister (Scotty from Marketing)  then got up in the Parliament and demanded her resignation in terms which implied that she, and the negotiating team, were basically a bunch of crooks, blah blah blah etc. He publicly demanded her resignation.

 

Finally this year there was a Senate enquiry into the matter and she came out of it the absolute and well deserved winner as she should have been. She quietly pointed out the facts of the matter, and the way in which the Board of the Post Office had succumbed to this politically induced fit of public hysteria. So far our idiotic PM has refused to apologise for his very public political crucifixion of her, nor has she been reinstated. Yet she has done the country a great service in maintaining banking facilities in many towns where banks had been summarily closed without any consideration for local needs, and at an overall cost far less than she had been authorised to spend.

 

Our conservative government has for years been bleeding our publicly owned business like the Post Office and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation of funds so that they can find excuses to privatize them. The Australia Post saga is just part of that agenda. 

 

 

Edited April 25, 2021 by Malcolm 0-6-0

[CKPR]

I recall lectures during my professional training on the notion that incompetence is the basis of promotion in those professions for which the organisation has borne the not inconsiderable costs of training  and where incompetence on the 'front line' has very serious consequences, e.g. soldiering, medicine, flying commercial planes, etc. The net result is that the very best people are purposefully kept on relatively lowly front-line duties and the very worst are swiftly given well-paid managerial roles. I have to say that this was certainly my experience working in and with the NHS, about which I am legally obliged to say no more.   

Edited April 25, 2021 by CKPR

[Nearholmer]

A guy from whom I learned a lot had been quite senior in REME, then worked at the MOD, before coming to manage railway works. 
 

He had a ‘four box’ model, one axis intelligence, the other energy/pro-activity, and it selected people for roles:

 

- intelligence + active, front-line command;

 

- stupid + lazy, front-line, following orders;

 

- intelligent +lazy, HQ and ‘behind the lines’ command;

 

- stupid + active, highly dangerous, get rid of.

 

Not entirely facetious!

 

BTW, my view is that the only really good way to keep directors and very senior managers ‘up to scratch’ is to have really, really good models of accountability to a superior body with teeth. Few, if any, shareholder bodies fit the Bill, and in the public sector a very high proportion of the ‘accountability chains’ are so diffuse as to be useless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 25, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Caley Jim]

On 24/04/2021 at 11:57, rocor said:

 December 2019, the Post Office paid out £58 million to sub-postmasters who were awarded compensation for past false prosecutions of monetary theft, of this £43 million was for legal cost.

As always seems to be the case in these situations, the only winners are the b****y lawyers! 

 

Jim

[monkeysarefun]

5 hours ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

Our conservative government has for years been bleeding our publicly owned business like the Post Office and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation of funds

Not  to mention robodebt - the  shakedown racket that the government  ran on the unemployed which played out and ended much like the British post office scandal.

 

Briefly, the government concerned at possible over-payments to those on unemployment benefits and income support implemented a system where by clever software would match peoples taxation records with social security records looking for instances of double dipping, ie claiming benefits while holding down a job.

 

Previously, officers had scrutinised each discrepancy on a case by case basis before raising an over-payment notice but the software was so advanced no human checking was necessary and it would automatically send out letters of demand to those who it deemed were claiming unemployment or income support at the same time that the taxation records reported them as having an income.

 

In addition, where previously the DHS collected verifying information from employers, the new system shifted responsibility for providing information to the individuals concerned, reversing the “onus of proof”.

 

As a 2017 Senate committee report points out,

 

"the responsibility for checking and clarifying income information has shifted from the department to current and former recipients of Centrelink payments. … the significant reduction in workload for the department by this outsourcing, has allowed for a huge increase in the number of income discrepancy investigations that the department initiates"

 

As a result, the Senate report pointed out the number of “debt interventions” increased from 20,000 in 2015-16 to nearly 800,000 in 2016-17. Thats an awful  lot of cheating Australians and vindicated the governments implementing the scheme, in its own head at least and they announced they were expanding it to include disabled and old age pension recipients.

 

People who didn't keep financial statements such as pay slips going back 7 years were forced to pay back what the government deemed they owed - often in the thousands to tens of thousands. People unable to disprove the clams despite being convinced they were incorrect were hounded to repay. Many people just paid the requested amount in order to get it over with, some suicided, others lost homes and relationships.

 

Some however fought back and with legal assistance questioned the amount. When this started to happen word got out that the government would often come back with a smaller amount following the investigation of the case by a human officer. One student got a letter of demand for a debt of just over $3,200 that had been raised against her — plus a penalty of 10% for “not engaging” — when her income tax refund of around $1,700 was taken as repayment.

She began litigation and Centrelink gathered information from her employers to determine the debt should be reduced to $1.48. A subsequent Freedom of Information request revealed she had actually been underpaid by $480.

In September 2019, the DHS completely dropped the debt but refused to pay interest.

 

Other similar cases emerged and it was discovered that the clever software was actually averaging out a persons income shown in their tax return  over the entire year and applying this amount to each week, rather than just applying it to weeks the recipient worked. For instance a  case may have had 2 or 3 months of work and 9 months of unemployment so the taxable income shouldn't have applied to those 9 months. Thus instead of the person double-dipping, the clever softwares algorithm was simply making it appear so.

 

In November 2019, the Federal Court ruled that income averaging was unlawful – a conclusion the government conceded a week before the above case came to trial.

It was this ruling that required the government to have more than 500,000 individual debts manually recalculated - at an unknown cost.

 

A class action was bought against the government and  has been settled at a cost to the government (ie us taxpayers) of around $1.2 billion. According to federal Labor frontbencher Bill Shorten, this is the biggest class action in Australian legal history.

This comprised refunds of $721 million to 373,000 people, $112 million in compensation and $398 million in cancelled debts.

 

The bloke who implemented the majority of the  scheme was sacked and humiliated. Oops, I meant to say that he's  gone on to become our Prime Minister.

 

 

 

Edited April 25, 2021 by monkeysarefun

[rocor]

3 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

Not  to mention robodebt - the  shakedown racket that the government  ran on the unemployed which played out and ended much like the British post office scandal.

 

Briefly, the government concerned at possible over-payments to those on unemployment benefits and income support implemented a system where by clever software would match peoples taxation records with social security records looking for instances of double dipping, ie claiming benefits while holding down a job.

 

Previously, officers had scrutinised each discrepancy on a case by case basis before raising an over-payment notice but the software was so advanced no human checking was necessary and it would automatically send out letters of demand to those who it deemed were claiming unemployment or income support at the same time that the taxation records reported them as having an income.

 

In addition, where previously the DHS collected verifying information from employers, the new system shifted responsibility for providing information to the individuals concerned, reversing the “onus of proof”.

 

As a 2017 Senate committee report points out,

 

"the responsibility for checking and clarifying income information has shifted from the department to current and former recipients of Centrelink payments. … the significant reduction in workload for the department by this outsourcing, has allowed for a huge increase in the number of income discrepancy investigations that the department initiates"

 

As a result, the Senate report pointed out the number of “debt interventions” increased from 20,000 in 2015-16 to nearly 800,000 in 2016-17. Thats an awful  lot of cheating Australians and vindicated the governments implementing the scheme, in its own head at least and they announced they were expanding it to include disabled and old age pension recipients.

 

People who didn't keep financial statements such as pay slips going back 7 years were forced to pay back what the government deemed they owed - often in the thousands to tens of thousands. People unable to disprove the clams despite being convinced they were incorrect were hounded to repay. Many people just paid the requested amount in order to get it over with, some suicided, others lost homes and relationships.

 

Some however fought back and with legal assistance questioned the amount. When this started to happen word got out that the government would often come back with a smaller amount following the investigation of the case by a human officer. One student got a letter of demand for a debt of just over $3,200 that had been raised against her — plus a penalty of 10% for “not engaging” — when her income tax refund of around $1,700 was taken as repayment.

She began litigation and Centrelink gathered information from her employers to determine the debt should be reduced to $1.48. A subsequent Freedom of Information request revealed she had actually been underpaid by $480.

In September 2019, the DHS completely dropped the debt but refused to pay interest.

 

Other similar cases emerged and it was discovered that the clever software was actually averaging out a persons income shown in their tax return  over the entire year and applying this amount to each week, rather than just applying it to weeks the recipient worked. For instance a  case may have had 2 or 3 months of work and 9 months of unemployment so the taxable income shouldn't have applied to those 9 months. Thus instead of the person double-dipping, the clever softwares algorithm was simply making it appear so.

 

In November 2019, the Federal Court ruled that income averaging was unlawful – a conclusion the government conceded a week before the above case came to trial.

It was this ruling that required the government to have more than 500,000 individual debts manually recalculated - at an unknown cost.

 

A class action was bought against the government and  has been settled at a cost to the government (ie us taxpayers) of around $1.2 billion. According to federal Labor frontbencher Bill Shorten, this is the biggest class action in Australian legal history.

This comprised refunds of $721 million to 373,000 people, $112 million in compensation and $398 million in cancelled debts.

 

The bloke who implemented the majority of the  scheme was sacked and humiliated. Oops, I meant to say that he's  gone on to become our Prime Minister.

 

 

 

 

I have given thought to what would have been a suitable sanction to impose upon the bloke involved.

 

What I consider to be appropriate would be:

 

1)  A lifetime ban from serving in any public office.

 

2)  Being given an individualized tax code, that ensured that they were never allowed to keep any more of their income than someone on minimum wage. With the taxation authorities scrupulously ensuring that this was adhered to.

 

 

[Regularity]

10 hours ago, Hroth said:

It's the Peter principle, innit!

 

People in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence"

Properly, people rise to one level above their competency, and then drop back to their true level. Failing to drop back does mean, yes, that they have risen to the point at which they start to become incompetent, but as events are showing us, they seem to be able to carry on developing their incompetence to new levels. Probably because “cost-cutting” is the easiest thing to measure in business performance, but intrinsic value (aka “good will”) is the hardest thing to measure, especially in services (transport, post, etc as well as education, health and welfare), which is the gap that applying the “rigour” of the marketplace to services fails to address

Edited April 25, 2021 by Regularity
Deleted text relevant to being on a different thread.

[Edwardian]

6 hours ago, Caley Jim said:

As always seems to be the case in these situations, the only winners are the b****y lawyers! 

 

Jim

 

Not this one, sadly.

 

 

It amuses me how often lawyers are blamed for dealing with the consequences of other people's Original Sin.

 

I tell you, we are among the few who care, or even notice, the erosion of your liberties, we are the answer to the question quis custodiet ipsos custodes and we may well be the only thing that stands between you and the pack of rogues and fools who govern us.

[Caley Jim]

I take your point, James.  It just annoys me that when you see an award for damages given, the person who has been wronged often receives less than his/her legal team!  And as for these 'No win, no fee' characters.....

 

Jim

[Regularity]

1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

we are among the few who care, or even notice, the erosion of your liberties, we are the answer to the question quis custodiet ipsos custodes

As you say, you are not the only ones who care, and I sincerely doubt that all lawyers do.

Who guards the guards? Ultimately, the electorate. 
god help us!

[ian]

Lawyers do have a difficult circle to square.

 

Let us assume that they know their client is guilty (it does happen on occasions, despite the prisons being full of innocent people) none the less their client has a right to be defended in court and, given that they are being paid, to the best of their ability.

 

If the client gets off then they have done their part but justice has only been served in relation to their client's rights. Some will not loose any sleep over this but I am sure that some have a great difficulty with it.

[Annie]

9 hours ago, Regularity said:

but intrinsic value (aka “good will”) is the hardest thing to measure, especially in services (transport, post, etc as well as education, health and welfare), which is the gap that applying the “rigour” of the marketplace to services fails to address

My first job was a newly minted social worker was working for a government agency that assisted folk with disabilities into mainstream employment .  It was a wonderful job in that I learned so much from the people I was working with (named by the PC brigade as being 'clients'), but the big downside was that I had to meet a target of so many warm bodies herded off each month into gainful employment or meaningful training that would lead to employment.   

Only someone who had never been near the disability sector could have dreamed up the idea of performance targets.  I don't think it takes much thought to realise that anybody who will need a lot of support is going to be sidelined in favour of folk who will need a minimum of support.  Taking on a client who would need a lot of support to get into a job could well lead to being on the carpet over not meeting targets.  Apparently it hadn't always been like this for the agency as originally staff could take all the time that was needed to support a client into permanent work.  BUT then the bean counters and statisticians wanted proof that the government's money was being properly spent so targets were brought in, - no doubt on the advice of an expensive consultant who didn't have a clue about how to run a disability support service.

 

As you might well guess with my health being a bit on the none the best side due to my woolworths autoimmune system I couldn't keep up and I got given an official warning.  So on the advice of my doctor I tossed the job in.  Later on somebody senior in the government agency realised that I had been ill at the time I was given that official warning and they got into a panic over the possibility that they were wide open to being sued.  Anyway to cut a long story short at the exit interview they requested I attend I told them I didn't have the energy to take them to court and they could all go sod off.

 

I had worked with a lot of other services during my time in disability support and after a while I was approached by the local area adult mental health team and I was offered a job.  I told them I couldn't work long hours and they said, 'Fine, we'll work in with you.'  Thinking there had to be a catch I asked if they had performance targets and they said, 'No of course not.'   And that's how i ended up working for the adult mental health service for the next eight years until I finally had to retire due to ill health.

 

I could also mention how some dropped-on-their-head-when-they-were-a-baby business school 101 graduate in the Health Dept during the tenure of one of our brain dead Tory governments decided that mental health services had to turn a profit,........ BUT I guess you've had enough tales of stupidity for one day.

Edited April 26, 2021 by Annie
can't spell for toffee

[Joseph_Pestell]

8 hours ago, ian said:

Lawyers do have a difficult circle to square.

 

Let us assume that they know their client is guilty (it does happen on occasions, despite the prisons being full of innocent people) none the less their client has a right to be defended in court and, given that they are being paid, to the best of their ability.

 

If the client gets off then they have done their part but justice has only been served in relation to their client's rights. Some will not loose any sleep over this but I am sure that some have a great difficulty with it.

 

I think that you have that wrong. If a barrister knows that the client is guilty, he can not defend a not guilty plea. He can only plead mitigating circumstances.

Barristers are very careful that the client does not tell them that they are guilty. Thinking that the client is guilty and knowing that the client is guilty are two different things.

[Edwardian]

8 hours ago, ian said:

Lawyers do have a difficult circle to square.

 

Let us assume that they know their client is guilty (it does happen on occasions, despite the prisons being full of innocent people) none the less their client has a right to be defended in court and, given that they are being paid, to the best of their ability.

 

If the client gets off then they have done their part but justice has only been served in relation to their client's rights. Some will not loose any sleep over this but I am sure that some have a great difficulty with it.

 

Laying aside that defence lawyers will often be mitigating in relation to those who plead guilty or will give much needed representation to those who may plead guilty to some offences on the indictment, yet properly wish to defend others .....

 

Lawyers are almost never in a position to know their client is guilty.  Where they do, they cannot act on an instruction to plead not guilty, but would withdraw from the case.

 

It is not the advocate's job, however, to judge a client. It is their job to follow instructions and put the best case possible. That means that they must extend the benefit of doubt, and there is necessarily doubt before a verdict is determined. 

 

The story told to us as baby barristers was this:

 

Client on criminal charge insists on stating he is of previous good character.  That is code for no previous convictions.

 

The rule here is that the Crown is not allowed to disclose previous convictions to the jury unless in rebuttal of a claim to be of good character.

 

Young defence Barrister has been shown by the prosecution a list of previous convictions as long as your arm. Puts this to his client. Client says, 'it wasn't me' and insists on stating he is of good character.

 

Barrister goes to head of chambers for advice as to whether he should now withdraw from the case. ''No'', says head of chambers, ''those are your instructions and you should follow them, it's not your job to weigh the evidence and decide who is right''

 

Turns out that the list of previous convictions related to someone with the same name as the defendant,..

 

If the barrister had acted as judge and jury on his client, the defendant would have ended up without representation.

 

What the laity are saying when they say 'how can you represent guilty people?' is really 'why didn't you do the job of judge and jury in relation to your client before agreeing to represent them?'. That, of course, is not a legal representative's part of the process.  

 

EDIT: Post crossed with Mr Pestell, who is quite correct.

 

 

Edited April 26, 2021 by Edwardian

[Regularity]

4 hours ago, Annie said:

named by the PC brigade as being 'clients'

That moved into business parlance, too. 

20+ years ago, someone I worked with was shot down by another collegiate when referring to customers as "clients", with the following withering remark.

"Not clients. Customers. The only people who have clients are lawyers.

And prostitutes."

[Compound2632]

Also estate agents. 

 

Sorry, probably not helping!

 

The big problem with our justice system at the moment is not money but the lack of it. 

[Edwardian]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

Also estate agents. 

 

 

 

No, they have victims

[ian]

I bow to Edwardian's knowledge of proper procedure but, sadly, not all of his profession appear so scrupulous.

 

About a quarter of a century ago the company I work for shared a building with, amongst others, a firm of solicitors whose bread and butter work was defending the local criminals. Overhearing some of the conversations about their 'regular customers' was interesting and it seemed that often they had no doubt about their clients' culpability.

[Hroth]

44 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

No, they have victims

 

I'm enmeshed with property sharks estate agents at the monent, perhaps I need a lawyer to claim compensation?

 

I see Vennells is "leaving" a number of Board posts and stopping her duties as an ordained Church of England minister.  She is quoted as saying

 

Quote

It is obvious that my involvement with the Post Office has become a distraction from the good work undertaken by the boards I serve. I have therefore stepped down with immediate effect from all of my board positions.

Source BBC :  Post office scandal: Ex-boss quits director jobs after scandal

 

Oh really. A distraction??

I wonder if its a jumped or pushed situation?

 

[rocor]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

Also estate agents. 

 

Sorry, probably not helping!

 

The big problem with our justice system at the moment is not money but the lack of it. 

 

The big problem with our system at the moment is not money but the Byzantine algorithm that determines its distribution. 

[Compound2632]

8 minutes ago, rocor said:

 

The big problem with our system at the moment is not money but the Byzantine algorithm that determines its distribution. 

 

Do you think that is responsible for the backlog in cases awaiting hearing?