The Waitaki District Health Services Trust has been granted another exemption from its financial reporting requirements.
The Waitaki District Council has granted the trust an exemption from producing a separate audited annual report four times since 2006.
It came up for review again at this week’s council meeting as part of the usual three-year cycle.
When Waitaki District Health Services Limited, the company that owns and operates Oamaru Hospital, was set up in 1998, it could not receive donations without paying tax on them.
The trust was set up as a charitable entity, to receive and invest donations to support the hospital and health services in the district.
Council finance and corporate development group manager Paul Hope said that since then, the tax status of the company had changed, so it could receive donations directly, making the trust redundant.
"It has almost nothing going through it now, but it still has some historic investments that it looks after."
The exemption was not to remove scrutiny of the trust, but to reduce the cost of producing a separate audited annual report each year, which could be up to $30,000, he said — "very much a procedural issue".
In moving the motion to grant the exemption on Wednesday, Waitaki district councillors added a requirement for the Waitaki District Health Services board to produce separate end-of-year financial statements for each arm of its group operation, for scrutiny.
At a council meeting last month, concerns were raised about transparency, as the annual financial results were not broken down for the Waitaki District Health Services Group, which is made up of the company that owns and operates the hospital, the trust and the Observatory Retirement Village.
This is due to a 2019 ruling by the Auditor-general, for council-controlled Waitaki District Health Services to include the retirement village operations in its annual reporting.
The unaudited draft annual report showed the group had a net surplus of $2,637,143 for the 2020-21 financial year, but it did not show that Waitaki District Health Services Limited recorded a net overall deficit of $1,071,209, or a breakdown of staff costs.
At this week’s meeting, councillors also heard from Jan Goldsmith and Janice Clayton, of Waitaki Health Watch, who were respectively lobbying for more transparency in the organisation’s reporting and a shift in focus from Oamaru Hospital’s ongoing deficit to future-proofing the company to meet the needs of a growing community.
Mayor Gary Kircher said Oamaru Hospital was a "very important part" of the community and the council was focused on making sure it was doing the best job it could.
