Health NZ was tracking $28 billion on a single Excel spreadsheet:

According to Deloitte, the spreadsheet—the backbone of Health NZ’s financial tracking—was riddled with human errors, lacked proper tracking, and made it nearly impossible to verify uploaded data. A simple error could throw entire budgets off course. 

The agency was burning through $130 million per month beyond its income, while its $500 million “savings plan” was deemed completely ineffective.

There are numerous AI tools such as Fluence, Pigment, Decision Brain and others, that are designed to handle such complexity and that do it in their stride for multi-billion dollar corporations.

But FFS, even the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems of thirty years ago could have handled this, and should have. I recall working as an IT consultant in the late 1980’s converting new SOE’s over from cash-based to accrual-accounting systems and thus harnessing the best ERP systems of the day.

How the hell did the Health authorities get missed, and for three decades plus?

I am almost beyond words. Were it not a Deloitte report I’d dismiss this as a reporter mis-understanding the systems. And for once I’m actually angry; I don’t have health insurance and while I’ve used our healthcare system not at all since I was a kid (excluding my wife’s childbirths), I’m going to need it sooner or later.

Like many of our institutions I increasingly have little confidence that they’ll actually help me.