New Zealand: 14.5 billion euros managed with an Excel spreadsheet

The New Zealand authority Health New Zealand (HNZ), which is responsible for the public healthcare system, managed its 14.5 billion euro budget using a single Excel spreadsheet. Not surprisingly, this led to long processing times for monthly financial reports. According to a report by Deloitte, it took 12 to 15 days to collect the data for this process and another 5 days to analyze it.

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This was commissioned after the authority exceeded its budget for the years 2023 and 2024. It goes on to say that the financial reports of the various districts were summarized in this single table to generate an “overview”. This also led to further problems with tracking expenditure, a high susceptibility to errors due to typos and out-of-date interim figures due to the long processing times.

“The use of an Excel spreadsheet file to track and report on the financial performance of an organization with $28 billion (NZD) in expenditure raises significant concerns, particularly when other, more appropriate systems are in place in the IT landscape,” the report states.

The situation is no better when you look further at the state of the agency. For the Health Minister, Simeon Brown, said a few days ago that HNZ uses 6000 different applications for its work. That's an average of one different application for every sixteenth employee. In addition, 100 different networks are also operated.

He further explained: “The senior leadership team members have only just started meeting in person on a weekly basis and continue to work from different offices, even though most live in Auckland and the organization is two and a half years old.” HNZ was established in 2022 to unite 20 different district authorities.

(tlz)