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The system, supplied by Japanese IT services provider Fujitsu, had erroneously registered cash shortfalls in Post Office branches, leading to hundreds of convictions of theft, fraud and false accounting between and The scandal is one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history. But the Post Office scandal reveals a wider issue. To avoid future scandals, we need to take responsibility for the digital systems at the heart of governance — instead of just scapegoating IT firms and their products when things go wrong. Computers in government The Crucible: Is Scapegoating The Solution? systems have been in government for nearly 70 years. Read click The female enigmas of Bletchley Park in the s should encourage those of tomorrow But like most departments, the Post Office outsourced their computer systems to huge global computer services providers in the s.
They then seemingly ignored them wherever possible, believing in the huge contract value as a guarantee of trustworthiness and reliability. This latest scandal is a classic case of officials putting blind faith in computer systems as definitive sources of information and truth. And this attitude goes far beyond the Post Office — across the departments of state.
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Story continues Outsourcing IT Over the years, government departments in the UK stopped innovating with technology, and have started contracting it all out to computer services providers. They were ignored in public administration scholarship, myself a lonely outlier in writing my PhD and first book about them.
But these complex mega contracts meant that departmental officials knew nothing about the systems on which they relied. Many of these flawed systems linger on in government. After decades of problems with computerisation, the Department for Work and Pensions struggled for another decade to build its new universal credit system alongside legacy systems. Inanother NAO report found that Border Force staff were relying on a year-old system to check whether suspects and persons of interest were trying to enter the UK.
Legacy systems represent an accountability vacuum: whole tranches of government administration for which nobody feels responsible. The implications of this blind trust in the power of computers and the companies that supply them to government are ever more important today. The debacle was actually the fault of a rather prosaic statistical method that was not overseen by experts. Scapegoating unaccountable algorithms is convenient, but it misses the point that without accountability and transparencygovernment IT systems can lead The Crucible: Is Scapegoating The Solution? a multitude of harms.
But we can build in controls. At The Alan Turing Institute, we have set up the Public Policy Programme to help government realise the potential of the latest generation of data-intensive technologies, and have produced the first official guidance for the safe and ethical use of The Crucible: Is Scapegoating The Solution? in the public sector.
Computers in government
The Post Office scandal shows that the same mechanisms should be applied to elderly legacy systems and unexciting algorithms. We need to build accountability and transparency into this forgotten, hidden, mystery world to get the kind of digital technology we want. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.]
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