Health New Zealand (HNZ), set up in 2022 to streamline the country’s health bureaucracy, has proven it can’t keep its books straight. A damning report by Deloitte found that HNZ lost “control of the critical levers that drive financial outcomes,” leading to budget blowouts and an inability to respond to spending overruns.

The problem is a lone Excel spreadsheet acting as the primary financial data source, used for everything from journal entries to business-critical reporting.

The report detailed a horror show of “hard-coded” numbers, rampant errors, missing data, and a complete lack of tracking, meaning even a stray keystroke could throw millions off balance. Consolidating monthly financials took up to 15 days, practically the dark ages for an organisation of this scale.

Health Minister Simeon Brown admitted that HNZ has “an estimated 6,000 applications and 100 digital networks” floating around its IT landscape—one for every 16 staff members—yet still runs its core financials on a spreadsheet.

Leadership isn’t helping either, with senior brass only starting weekly in-person meetings, despite most of them living in Auckland and the organisation being two and a half years old.

Despite this chaotic setup, there’s no immediate plan to fix anything. Brown vaguely promised to investigate “creating a separate Health Infrastructure Entity” to manage digital assets.

Still, there’s no timeline on when, or even if, that will happen. Given the history of ERP implementations attempting to replace spreadsheet chaos, HNZ could be in for years of expensive tech misadventures.