Comment by rcxdude

It was worse than that. Higher ups in the post office knew the system was buggy and still doubled down on it. Yes, if the accounting software wasn't terrible the whole issue would not have happened, but there were so, so, many chances for the post office to do the right thing afterwards that it's not at all fair to blame the results on the poor quality software, which very notably did not prosecute thousands of people for fraud while telling each of them they were the only ones being flagged by the system.

(THERAC-25 was a little more towards 'just bad software', but there were still systemic failures there as well).