Then they are incompetent, and lacking even base Google-search curiosity. Drivesavers. Drivesavers.com.
IT departments have always been pretty worthless, but if they can't type "Mac data recovery" into Google as I did, then they should be summarily fired. For that matter, your friend, too, if he's willing to allow years of data to be thrown out as the cost of not doing that 5 second search.
I call BS.
Actually, the hard-drive has been sent to two companies that specialize in data retrieval and both failed and did not collect their fees of a few thousand bucks.