In what’s now being called one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history, the Japanese information technology services company Fujitsu Ltd. said on Tuesday that it has a “moral responsibility” to compensate the many victims.

Between 1999 and 2015, about 900 people who worked for the U.K.’s government-owned Post Office were wrongly accused of theft and fraud when money started going missing from the branches where they worked. At the time, the U.K. was using software from Fujitsu in an effort to automate the accounting processes.

It’s now known the software was faulty, and the theft and fraud were a consequence of software glitches, yet many of those prosecuted for crimes – close to 700 – were sent to prison. To date, only 93 have had their convictions overturned. Many others, according to reports, lost their life savings, and some of those who were shamed and financially ruined took their own lives.

There could still be more people who were affected, perhaps tens of thousands when customers are involved. The scandal has not only exposed government incompetence but raises a lot of questions regarding trust in software. Fujitsu’s European boss, Paul Patterson, has now admitted the company had known since the 1990s that the IT system was faulty.

“I think there is a moral obligation for the company to contribute,” Patterson said. “The right place to determine that is when our responsibility is very clear. There are many parties involved in this travesty.” He apologized for the “appalling miscarriage of justice” and admitted, “We did have bugs and errors from the start, and we did help the Post Office with prosecutions of subpostmasters.”

Fujitsu earned in the region of £2.4 ($3 billion) from its contract with the U.K. government, while the taxpayer-owned Post Office is expected to pay out about £1 billion ($1.3 billion) in compensation. The Post Office is still using the system, but the contract ends in 2025.

Many victims are still waiting for their payout, with some now very old. “They convinced me that it was all my fault,” one of the victims still awaiting compensation said. “I wasn’t tech-savvy…. I thought I’d made a hash of it. They’d gaslit me for about three years.”

Photo: Nikolas Moya/Flickr