An agency in New Zealand has been working with an Excel spreadsheet for years. The final audit report is devastating. The agency was already considered expensive and slow.
Which agency is it? The agency that manages New Zealand’s public health system uses a single Excel spreadsheet as the primary data source for consolidating and managing its finances.
The agency using the spreadsheet is Health New Zealand (HNZ), which replaced 20 district health boards in 2022 in the expectation of being more cost-efficient and providing more uniform services. However, with the Excel solution, they likely did not find the best alternative in the IT landscape.
Devastating verdict of a report for the Excel spreadsheets
What went wrong? At the time, the agency informed the government that the budget of NZ$28 billion (approximately €14 billion) for the fiscal year 2023/2024 was more than sufficient. However, the health department significantly underestimated and exceeded the estimated budget.
During the subsequent audit, it was found that the organization “lost control over the critical levers that govern financial performance” and was “unable to recognize and respond to the discrepancy between expenditures and revenues.” This is stated in a report by the consulting and management company Deloitte.
The Deloitte report also questions why an agency responsible for €14 billion does not use a more sensible tool than an Excel spreadsheet:
The use of an Excel spreadsheet to track and report on the financial performance of an organization with expenditures of NZ$28 billion raises significant concerns, especially when other, better-suited systems are available in the IT landscape.
Instead of becoming more efficient and especially faster, the report suggests that they actually achieved the opposite: for monthly reporting, they needed 12 to 15 days, and for data analysis, another 5 days. According to the report, Health NZ is therefore far behind what it aimed to achieve after the merger in 2022.
On the other hand, the Excel spreadsheet itself led to multiple problems, reports the English-language magazine TheRegister.com: Data in the spreadsheet could be manipulated relatively easily, and it was also very prone to human errors, which is exemplified by a case: incorrect approvals for provisions or duplicate approvals were only discovered in subsequent periods, leading to financial issues.
The organization that coordinates Japan’s cyber defense itself fell victim to a hacker attack – and this occurred over a period of nine months without anyone noticing. There is no official confirmation of the perpetrators, but previous attacks on Japan have been linked to a Chinese hacker group: Japan established an agency for cyber security – later found out 9 months later that it had been hacked
