Dunedin man Michael Swann has begun giving evidence in his High Court jury trial for alleged multi-million dollar fraud against the Otago District Health Board while he was its chief information officer.
Swann (47) and his friend Kerry Harford (48) both deny dishonestly and fraudulently obtaining $16.902 million from the board between August 2000 and 2006 by charging for risk mitigation insurance services the Crown says were never provided and which Harford's company, Sonnford Solutions, the name on the 198 invoices, could not have provided.
Before Swann began his evidence his lawyer, John Haigh QC, reminded the jurors of the need to analyse the intention behind Swann's action.
He said the key element might be whether Swann had the honest belief that the contracts Sonnfords had with the ODHB were genuine and provided "value for money".
At no stage did Swann ever intend to defraud the board, he never knew he was breaching his legal obligations or acting dishonestly, Mr Haigh said.
Swann told Justice Stevens and the jury that when he was hired by Healthcare Otago in 1998, the hospital IT department was "going absolutely nowhere".
He said it it had become "stagnated from overburdening paperwork" which meant it took a new staff member about five or six weeks to be given access to the computer system - after filling out "10 pieces of paper which were filed in folders".
He threw out all the folders, Swann said, and streamlined the introduction of new users onto the system so they became a user on the system "before they got paid".
And with the help of Mark Black and "some of the other very competent team members", he upgraded the system until, by the time his employment was terminated in 2006, the ODHB's IT department was seen by other hospital boards as one of the top performing IT departments in the country, and was rated in the top 50 in Management Information Systems magazinerankings.
