The intent was to keep their chummy contract with government going and keep riding the gravy train, no matter how shit the software was.
So far, I haven't seen evidence of anyone at Fujitsu inserting fake records in order to enrich the company - FYI the contract was such that the government took basically no risk, Fujitsu fronted the money to pay for Horizon's development, and in return Fujitsu gets a cut of all transactions. All they need to do is keep the sweet deal going.
What I have seen evidence of is them clearly detecting bugs, and inserting fake records to make the numbers reconcile, but still being so thick that their support staff didn't notice the fake numbers didn't add up either.
Their motive appears to keep the corporate gravy train going, so yes it's personal enrichment, and to fudge the numbers on the sly so nobody questions Fujitsu's competence to run their system... but not cook the books directly.
Then of course the Post Office would prosecute the SPMs for discrepencies hallucinated by Fujitsu's broken accounting software, and not be curious or ask questions of Fujitsu, because then the Post Office bosses wouldn't get their performance-based bonuses.
> Chambers admitted to the Inquiry that despite being told the discrepancies had occurred on various occasions at the branch throughout the year, she only looked at the system information behind the most recent discrepancy. She also didn’t check to see if something similar had been reported by any other branch. Her “investigation”, from assignation to conclusion, took one hour sixteen minutes.
> Chambers conceded that she didn’t know if it was an unknown system error was affecting the branch, and seemed to accept that her stark conclusion in 2013: “No fault in product” and “user” error, was misleading. She added:
> “I don’t think I handled it terribly well. I was frustrated by it and I think that shows… because, you know, it really looked like there was a genuine problem… [but]… There was no sign of it.”
> In summary, ten years ago, Anne Chambers appears not to have considered the possibility of unknown system problems, or prompted an investigation more advanced than what she could achieve within the limits of her knowledge and ability. Instead, after a quick squizz at a limited dataset she concluded there was no obvious problem, which meant there was no problem and the cause of the discrepancy was the Subpostmaster.
Is the intent accuracy? Was money a motive?
I don't know the full story but cooking the books is how you skim.
And once you're dirty, in order to come clean you need to expose everything.