Council squad tasked with finding answers to buried report

Friday, 27 February 2026

‘If you had a look at the report, it was certainly pretty damning,’ Hamilton City Deputy Mayor Geoff Taylor said.

Hamilton City Deputy Mayor Geoff Taylor will head-up a special delegation to find out why a damning report on council procurement was buried from public scrutiny for two years.

The 2024 draft report from top financial firm KPMG has now been provided to the council’s new Finance and Assurance Committee, and reveals a total of $239 million (or 12%) of total contract values had not gone through tenders.

That included five separate high-value contracts worth between $8m and $20m each.

The executive summary page of the procurement review gives a summary of the problems KPMG found.

A total of 62% of contract value for contracts between $100,000 and $1m did not go through tenders at all.

Of 1248 active contracts assessed in the report, only 25% had gone through a tender process.

The report also slated staff performance for finding “workarounds“, a lack of leadership, lack of robust internal audit processes and an ”overly complex and manual process”.

Speaking to the Waikato Times, deputy mayor Taylor said he was very happy to be part of the team to find out what happened.

“ I would like to know why that report didn't come to all the councillors. It's almost two years ago now. We need to find out how that happened and why and understand the processes.

The council’s looking for answers about the delay in sharing the report but it won’t be a witch-hunt, committee chairperson Rachel Karalus said.

“I was asking questions about it today, but we don't have that information yet, So once we do have that information, we can decide where to go from there. But certainly there's an issue that needs to be scrutinised.

“I mean, if you had a look at the report, it was certainly pretty damning. it highlighted some real deficiencies and, you know, some of them are contentious, but it certainly highlighted deficiencies, and I'm really disappointed that it's the first I've known about it, even though, you know, it was April 2024 and here we are almost two years down the track. So, I need answers.’’

At Thursday’s committee meeting chairperson Councillor Rachel Karalus said while it was not known why the report was not put before elected representatives previously, or why it was still only given to them in a draft form, it was hoped a delegation would find answers.

However, she pointed out it would not be a witch-hunt. She also noted there was now a new council, new mayor and a new chief financial officer in place, non of whom had been at the council when the report was done in 2024.

Mayor Tim Macindoe categorised the report and the delay as “disturbing’’ but added the council was moving on with a “shared determination’’.

The report was presented as a summary to the now defunct HCC committee in April 2024, but Cr Kalarus said it only recently became apparent that it had not been provided in full to elected members.

It has now been released in full “in the interests of transparency’’.

“For now the focus of this discussion is not on finding fault.’’

She highlighted that the council was willing to be open about issues, even when uncomfortable and assured the public that procurement problems were understood and being addressed.

Improvements would be made “with urgency’’, she said.

However, she cautioned against drawing conclusions without complete information.

New CFO Gary Connolly said progress had already been made on addressing the report’s findings.

“We've implemented some of those changes, we've developed a good plan.’’