Horse manure ! It beggars belief! These people are spending our $

In April Adam posted about what appeared to be yet another rort of public funds. This related to the apparent misuse of funds from the severely cash strapped Capital & Coast DHB

As Phil Kitchin’s and Fay Blundell’s DomPost article noted Capital & Coast had requested:-

Waikanae’s Te Runanga O Te Ati Awa Ki Whakarongotai to return $590,000 of unaccounted health funding. In the meantime it has cut four of its contracts with the runanga’s health provider, Hora Te Pai.

The runanga is in disarray; one group claiming to represent the runanga is embroiled in a scrap with a new group that has fought to get authorities to take notice of its concerns about where the health dollars went.

Yet CCDHB’s management, or at least one manager had appeared remarkably relaxed about this matter despite what appeared to be a very concerning state of affairs.

The DomPost Editorial on this matter noting:-

Regardless of the final outcome of the police inquiries, that is no way to manage $590,000 of taxpayers’ money. It is public money, and the handling of it should be transparent, with the details of where it is or what it has been spent on readily available.

There should be no need to wait, as one of those involved put it, until an accountant has “all the right information in the right boxes”
and
Equally perplexing is the attitude of CCDHB Maori health development accountability manager Jim Wiki, who, according to the police report, says the board will not be making a complaint because he believes the failings were due to naivety and a lack of ability.

That is no sort of accountability. It is the financial equivalent of telling a patient who has had a pair of forceps left in him that if the surgeon has a lack of ability it is an outcome that should be accepted, and that worries are groundless because the forceps can be retrieved.

Mr Wiki’s job is to ensure taxpayers get value for the money the CCDHB is spending, and patients get the services that money was meant to buy, not to provide excuses for the alleged failures of others.

Yet what do we now find out some months later.

An article earlier this week in the DomPost notes:-

Capital & Coast District Health Board will not try to recover hundreds of thousands of dollars earmarked for health but spent instead on farming and other investments by a Kapiti runanga.

Why not? This DHB is severely constrained and under major budget pressure. Indeed the former CEO resigned recently saying that he did not see where they free up more money from. Well we have to wonder what is going on in the DHB when we read this, and this:-

Capital & Coast planning and funding director Sandra Williams said yesterday that the board took legal advice and would not try to retrieve the money because it believed Hora Te Pai performed the services it was contracted to deliver. She said an “audit” found Hora Te Pai had made a $416,000 surplus in six years and just over half had been returned to Hora Te Pai’s accounts. She wanted to reassure people the board spent considerable effort to ensure health dollars were used properly by all groups it funded.

Just what planet is Ms Williams living on. How can she say this with a straight face.

Note these comments as well:-

Ms Williams described the report as an audit but PricewaterhouseCoopers said it had not “conducted any form of audit” and had “no opinion on the reliability, accuracy or completeness of the information” it relied on.

Why call a review an audit and invest it with spurious connotations of accuracy, when PWC clearly say it was not and indeed it would appear had had difficulties in obtaining information.

Furthermore it appears:-

The runanga also “invested” $200,000 of surplus funds in the BNZ and in May a former runanga Iwi Social Service manager made two improper payments totalling $4255 to herself from Hora Te Pai’s payroll, the report said.

Then:-

Ms Williams said the DHB’s primary concern was that patients had access to health services so it had now contracted Compass Primary Health Care Network to run Hora Te Pai’s services.

Hang on a minute, the DHB is spending taxpayers money here. Why is the DHB not concerned about the possibility for the misuse of taxpayer money? The PWC report at a minimum raises considerable concerns.

In addition we now have yet another CCDHB ‘manager’ appareently disinterested in whether taxpayer monies were appropriately spent. See the earlier post for details of who was involved last time.

In April the DomPost editorial noted:-

Equally perplexing is the attitude of CCDHB Maori health development accountability manager Jim Wiki, who, according to the police report, says the board will not be making a complaint because he believes the failings were due to naivety and a lack of ability.

That is no sort of accountability. It is the financial equivalent of telling a patient who has had a pair of forceps left in him that if the surgeon has a lack of ability it is an outcome that should be accepted, and that worries are groundless because the forceps can be retrieved.

Mr Wiki’s job is to ensure taxpayers get value for the money the CCDHB is spending, and patients get the services that money was meant to buy, not to provide excuses for the alleged failures of others.

Move on a few months, change the name and position and we seem to have a DHB culture that is somewhat cavalier towards the spending of and accounting for taxpayer money. All the more surprising when the DHB in question has the begging bowl out for more public funds.

Then of course there is this little gem. In April it was reported that :-

the Capital & Coast Maori Health Development accountability manager, Jim Wiki, said a complaint would not be made because he thought the failings were due to naivety and lack of ability.

Mr Wiki said there was a “possibility” the money would be repaid so “the board would not be forthcoming with any complaint to police”.

In a report obtained by The Dominion Post, Capital & Coast’s director of Maori health, Riki Nia Nia, said the runanga had failed to meet its contracted obligations. A 2009 audit found “a number of financial anomalies including transfers and advances from Hora Te Pai accounts”.

So in April the contractor was not really competent, in itself raising questions as to the governance of the process by which the contract is let, but leave that aside for now. In addition, the contractor had failed to meet its contracted obligations. So the contractor lacked competence and failed to meet its contracted obligations. Plus there were all those interesting financial anomalies, which the DHB did not seem very concerned about then and still does not appear to be very concerned about!

Then what do we read this week. Adam’s bolding of the text for emphasis:-

Capital & Coast planning and funding director Sandra Williams said yesterday that the board took legal advice and would not try to retrieve the money because it believed Hora Te Pai performed the services it was contracted to deliver.

So in September, a group that had previously lacked ability as identified by DHB management and which had it was stated failed to meet its contracted obligations has magically in the time from April, transformed itself and performed, over the life of the contract the services it was contracted to deliver. Adam finds that very hard to believe. This ‘metamorphosis’ is meant to justify the DHB not acting to ensure proper accounting for the use of taxpayer funds. What a crock! Just what is going on here?

After all on the basis of a single complaint and a limited review by the Companies Office, Allan Hubbard was placed in statutory management and the SFO called in. Yet here where there appear to be buckets of stinking fish everything appears to be swept under a rather large rug. Why the appearance of double standards?

This is not acceptable.

More to come later.

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