Dunedin hospital's IT technical administration team have told the High Court this morning they never saw any outside contractors working on the hospital servers, and knew of no association or maintenance contracts with companies called Sonnford Solutions or Computer South.
Mark Black and Craig Young both said they had not heard of either company until interviewed by the Serious Fraud Office in 2006.
The two men were responsible for all computer maintenance and repairs relating to the board's IT system.
They carried out the work themselves, calling in their supervisor, Michael Swann, if they needed backup.
If outside contractors had been brought in, they would have been aware of that, the witnesses said.
Mr Young recalled that after the hospital bought Del computers, a representative from that company would come to the department.
Asked about specific invoices from Sonnford Solutions charging the Otago District Health Board for back-up machine licences, SSA disk set-ups, AIX and firmware upgrades, both Mr Black and Mr Young said they were not aware of any such work being done and had never seen the invoices associated with Sonnfords.
The two men were called by the Crown in the trial of the board's former IT head and chief information officer Michael Andrew Swann (47) and Kerry Gray Harford (48), of Queenstown.
Both men deny three charges each of dishonestly and fraudulently using 198 Sonnford Solutions invoices to obtain $16.9 million from the district health board over a period of six years, between August 2000 and August 2006.
The Crown accuses the pair of billing the board for work described on the invoices but not actually carried out by the company.
But defence counsel John Haigh QC (Swann) and Greg King told the jurors in brief opening statements last week that Sonnfords was charging for a risk mitigation insurance type of service which would involve them calling in the necessary experts and obtaining any materials required if a major problems developed with any of the hopsital's three server computers.
Evidence has so far been heard from about 20 of the 40-plus witnesses Crown counsel Robin Bates proposes to call during the trial, set for about another week before Justice Stevens and a jury.
