SFO bypasses NZ evidence presentation package

By ADAM GIFFORD

The Serious Fraud Office is denying any hint of impropriety in its decision to buy American rather than New Zealand software for the electronic presentation of evidence.

The office used its new Sanction II software in a fraud trial at the Auckland District Court last week, allowing the judge, the four defendants, their lawyers and the jury to see the documents and video evidence on flat screen monitors.

It will also feature in October at the Auckland depositions trial against MP Donna Awatere-Huata.

A competing system developed by Dunedin's Animation Research, Jedi (judicial evidence display), was used by police in two murder trials in the South Island, and was demonstrated to the Serious Fraud Office several months ago.

Animation Research head Ian Taylor said it seemed yet another example of Government agencies favouring imported over home-grown technology, despite Government policy initiatives like the Industry Capability Network which tried to encourage the opposite.

"It is frustrating what is going on," said Taylor.

"Maybe they got their system cheaper, but we never got around to talking price with them.

"I got a phone call from their office shortly before they made the announcement asking 'How much will your system cost?'

I said we had been waiting to hear back from them about what they needed, what would be cost-effective and what could be made to work.

"It comes back to what point is there taking any risks in this country if you can't get any support from your own," he said.

Serious Fraud Office assistant director Gib Beattie said Sanction II cost less than $5000, well under the threshold where the purchase needed to go out to tender.

"We looked at what was available and chose Sanction II because it interfaced well with the existing electronic systems," Beattie said.

"I have no comment on Ian's system, but I understand it could have involved re-input of data."

The SFO uses a document management system from Summation, another US vendor, which was bought more than a decade ago to handle the documents generated in the Equiticorp trial.

Beattie said documents could be quickly shifted from the Summation system to Sanction II, as well as other files, such as the Powerpoint presentations prepared by forensic accountants to show company structures and money flows.

"We wanted there to be a minimal amount of work on top of what we had already done to get ready for trial," Beattie said.

Most of the almost $100,000 cost of the project went on hardware, including servers, scanners and monitors, so the office could use the system in two trials simultaneously as well as have a full back-up.

Beattie said that because so many of its cases relied on large numbers of documents, the SFO couldn't wait for the Department for Courts to come up with a system.

"We took the view an efficient way to get stuff done was to build a system ourselves and present it to the courts," he said.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice, Barry Ebert, said the ministry had no plans to introduce electronic evidence display technology into the courts, but it supported the use of such technology where it had the approval of the presiding judge.