A Brief Note On District Health Boards And Southern Dhb

1. Introduction On 1 January 2001, District Health Boards (DHBs) were established under the NZ Public Health and Disability Act 2000 (Kloosterman, 2010). There were a total of 21 districts health boards and Southern DHB is the first board formed as the result of the combination of two districts, Southland and Otago DHBs (Southern District Healthboard). SDHB was formed on 1 May 2010 and is responsible for most publicly funded primary health and hospital services in those two districts with a population of over 315,000 (Kloosterman, 2010). This report investigates the biggest fraud case committed by a state employee against a Government institution in New Zealand (Otago Daily Times, 2008), Otago District Health Board, which went†¦show more content†¦Sonnford Solution that was formed by Harford was alleged by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) that the company only acted as a front for their well-planned fraud (McDonald, 2009) had charged the company 198 invoices over the six years period for supposedly insurance-type services related to the provisions of IT licenses, services and support that was never provided by the company to the hospital (Peart, Otago Health Board fraud investigation: $16.9m siphon went unnoticed for years, 2008). SFO counsel, Robin Bates, said that Swann and Harford had an agreement where Harford would prepare the invoices; Swann would sign them off and then pass them to the board’s accounts department for payment. 10% of the amount (in total $1.7 million) was received by Harford and t he remaining 90% ($15.2 million) was given to Computer South Company which was under Swann’s control (Peart, Otago Health Board fraud investigation: $16.9m siphon went unnoticed for years, 2008). There was also a corrupt payment charge against Swann and Sew Hoy, the owner of Innovative Systems Limited. In between 14th January 2000 and 3rd November 2006, Innovative Systems Ltd received almost $5 million from ODHB for the services and consultancy provided in which the company paid $757,684.89 to Swann’s company. However, there were no invoices generated by Computer South Ltd and there was no justification for any payment by Innovative Systems to Computer South (NZPA, 2007).