You are Claudia Patricia Mosquera, CFO of Hospital San Roberto, a public hospital in Cali. It is Monday 7 July 2025, and internal control has left you five findings that keep the books from meeting CHIP, the new public accounting framework. This week you decide where your small transition team starts. The first report is due on 15 October.
The situation
San Roberto is a level-III state health enterprise: it serves about 280,000 people, employs about 1,240 staff and runs an annual budget of roughly COP 185,000 million. Its board is chaired by the governor of Valle del Cauca. Under the old budgetary, cash-based framework the hospital closed 2024 with a surplus of COP 2,800 million, and the governor's office cites it as proof that the hospital is healthy.
The internal-control report runs to five pages. There is COP 29,600 million of revenue already earned on services billed to the health insurers, who pay 45 to 120 days later, that was never recorded. There is COP 56,100 million of buildings and equipment never depreciated systematically (about 4,560 million a year), with medical equipment depreciated under different policies depending on the year it was bought. There is COP 20,270 million of unrecorded obligations, from final labour rulings to a pension estimate nobody has audited. And there is the close: it used to take 15 days; under CHIP the chief accountant, Hernán Lozano, reckons about 60. Between the 30 September cut-off and the filing with the national health regulator there are 15.
Every peso of provisions or depreciation that is recognised reduces a net equity of COP 28,000 million that the regulator reads as a solvency signal. Leaving certain obligations out exposes the report to findings from the same regulator. The whole transition has a budget of COP 180 million, and internal control tracks three indicators: CHIP compliance at 20%, regulatory risk at 75% and stakeholder confidence at 50%.
At 9:40 the governor's private secretary calls: the board wants a presentation in September, and the governor wants to know whether the 2024 surplus "is still going to be there".