From Random Audits to Annual Assurance: The Next Step for Care Minutes Reporting
- Health Generation
- Mar 12
- 2 min read
The Department of Health has recently released guidance explaining how auditors will assess the Care Minutes Performance Statement. While the document is written for auditors, it signals an important change in how care minutes reporting will operate across the sector.
Until now, residential aged care providers have self-reported care minutes through the Quarterly Financial Report (QFR). The Department has relied on targeted and randomised audits to verify reporting accuracy where required.
From the 2025–26 financial year, this approach will shift.
All residential aged care providers will be required to prepare a Care Minutes Performance Statement and engage an external auditor each year to review and verify it. Verification therefore moves from occasional government audits to annual independent assurance across the entire sector.
Importantly, the underlying reporting framework itself does not fundamentally change. Providers will continue reporting the same core data points, including:
Direct care minutes delivered
Direct care labour hours and costs
Registered nurse coverage
Occupied bed days
What changes is the expectation that these figures must now reconcile clearly across systems and withstand independent verification every year.
For many providers, the operational challenge is not collecting the data. Most homes already capture care minutes through their rostering systems, where workforce hours are recorded as part of daily operations.
The challenge is that many organisations still lack a dedicated care minutes reporting function that consolidates and reconciles this information into a clear, audit-ready view.
Care minutes data often sits across multiple systems — workforce rostering, payroll records, financial reporting tools, and care minutes monitoring platforms. When these systems do not reconcile perfectly, discrepancies can remain hidden during routine reporting.
An annual audit process, however, requires providers to present a clear and consistent reconciliation of those datasets.
That is why the release of the new auditor guidance matters. It provides early visibility into how auditors are expected to examine the data and what evidence will likely be required to support the Care Minutes Performance Statement.
Providers who want to understand the audit expectations in more detail can review the Department’s guidance here:
The direction of reform is becoming increasingly clear.
Care minutes reporting is moving from self-reported performance to independently verified performance. As this transition unfolds, the ability to maintain clear, consistent, and well-reconciled care minutes reporting will become increasingly important for providers across the sector.
