DHB won't chase iwi for surplus cash

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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.

A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers issued by the board yesterday said $276,000 worth of surplus health money from Te Runanga o Ati Awa ki Whakarongotai's health arm, Hora Te Pai, was invested in a bank and farming in Northland. If the board felt it should recover the surplus it gave Hora Te Pai, it should investigate how the money was spent and how to recover it, the report said.

But 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.

The report was commissioned a month after The Dominion Post revealed in April that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars earmarked for health had been spent on propping up a failed cafe and craft business and on the runanga's charitable trust.

A police scoping report obtained by the newspaper said the district health board's Maori health development accountability manager, Jim Wiki, told police that a complaint would not be made because the failings were dueto naivety and lack of ability.

Governance of the runanga remains divided between a group responsible at the time the money was spent and a rival group that criticised the way the money was spent and is trying to gain control of the iwi.

PricewaterhouseCoopers said its authors were told the runanga spent $76,000 on "farming activities" in North Auckland in 2005. "We have not considered the appropriateness of an investment of this nature for an organisation such as Hora Te Pai acknowledging it is not clear if Hora Te Pai funds were used."

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.

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.

PricewaterhouseCoopers said it asked for, but was not given, minutes of some meetings of the runanga executive and its charitable trust and there could be "matters of concern" to the DHB in those minutes prior to March 2008.

But charitable trust minutes from August 2008 said there was a request to break a term deposit with the BNZ to use $55,000 to fund marae refurbishment and then put the money back when "a lotteries grant is received", the report said.

PricewaterhouseCoopers said it could not confirm whether that happened.

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.

- © Fairfax NZ News