Britain's post office pays millions more to stay shackled to a faulty system. Live from the UK,

this is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Nick Qureshi in Fort Leanna

Burn. You might remember the UK post office scandal where hundreds of post office managers were

accused of fraud because they couldn't balance the books.

Some were even sent to jail, but they were innocent. It was all down to a faulty IT system developed by computer giant Fujitsu. Well, now the BBC's calculated the post office has spent

more than $800 million to continue using the faulty horizon system since attempting to end its contract

more than a decade ago. The BBC's Peter Ruddick has been following this for us. Hello Peter.

Hi Nick. Just remind us of the role this system has still has to this day.

Absolutely. It might be a real surprise for people that the IT system, essentially partly

responsible for the

wrongful prosecution of hundreds of sub-postmasters and many more who were pursued wrongly for

money they were told they owed is actually still in place in the post office. To understand this,

you have to rewind back a bit to the turn of the millennium when the post office in the UK started

doing more and more things

than just sending letters. You could absolutely buy stamps from the post office, but you would also

go there to get your welfare benefits, or you might be managing your bank account from in store. And that

meant that a system was needed to deal with all of these transactions to log them, a point of

sale and an accounting

system. And that's where Horizon came in. The trouble is, as soon as it was introduced, it came

with issues. And Fujitsu, its owners, because it just rented the system to the post office,

they never bought it outright. Fujitsu didn't fix the bugs or weren't quick enough in identifying issues,

and that's when the wrongful data was used to pursue people.

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