Taupō hospice boss Christine Rankin stunned as manager admits $62k theft from charity

Christine Rankin, chief executive of Lake Taupō Hospice, was stunned when one of her most trusted managers confessed to years of fraud.

Christine Rankin is a tough operator.

However, even she admits to being stunned to silence when one of her most trusted managers sat down and confessed he’d been stealing for years from his employer and local charity, Lake Taupō Hospice.

“I kept thinking, I’m going to wake up, I’m dreaming this,” Rankin told the Herald in an interview the day after Mark Wisniewski pleaded guilty in Taupō District Court to causing loss by deception (over $1000).

The unravelling began last October when Wisniewski - hospice’s retail operations manager - phoned Rankin, the hospice chief executive, and requested a meeting.

”I thought maybe he was going to tell me he was sick.

“I had absolutely no idea of what was coming… I did ask him ‘why?‘.

“I think I said something like, ‘I’ve always been good to you Mark’ and he said, ‘I was already addicted to it when you arrived’.”

It isn’t the first time Rankin had faced down fraud:

“I ran [government department] Work and Income. Yes, of course people stole benefit money and other things. I’ve seen it before…but I haven’t seen it like this.”

Rankin, now 71, has had a long, storied career in New Zealand public life. She worked her way through the ranks to lead the Ministry of Work and Income in the late 1990s.

And her departure from the job in the early 2000s was punctuated by three official inquiries and a failed employment court case.

She was also CEO of the short-lived New Zealand Conservative Party, ran unsuccessfully in the 2014 election, and has served on Taupō District Council since 2019.

The Lake Taupō Hospice Shop from which hospice retail manager Mark Wisniewski stole for at least six years.

It’s clear that Rankin has a thick skin, but this episode, she says, has felt like a betrayal, both of her personally and of the community, and especially its sick and dying to whom the hospice delivers nursing care.

That service is free of charge, and the whole operation, as Rankin puts it, runs on the smell of an oily rag.

Wisniewski is a well known skier and Taupō resident – he previously owned and ran a travel agency in town. By his own estimation, he took some $62,600 from the charity’s two hospice shops’ till takings over six years.

But Rankin, who took the reins as chief executive at the hospice in late 2023, says she believes the actual figure is “far, far greater”.

”He kept saying, ‘you’re going to be shocked when you find out how much it is’ but of course we found out he’d taken care to destroy so much, so many records, that we never found out how much he took…

“I can tell you this, he took a hell of a lot more than he’s been charged with. If it’s true that he took $62,000, then why did he destroy all the evidence, all of the deposit books, not one left from eight years.”

From August 2016 to October 2024, Wisniewski was responsible for banking the daily cash takings from the charity’s retail stores, in Taupō and Tūrangi respectively.

The loss is a heavy blow for the hospice. In the last financial year, its total revenue was $1.8m, over two thirds of which was derived from its retail shops, all of the inventory for which is donated.

It is likewise a blow to the agency’s nearly 300 volunteers and 35 staff.

On the face of it, Wisniewski’s deception was astonishingly simple.

According to the police statement of facts, retail staff handed unsealed cash takings to Wisniewski, who cut off the bottom portions of the cash register summaries, re-wrote the deposit slip and cash sheet reconciliation, and disposed of the original documents.

While hospice protocols had Wisniewski tally the retail shops’ take with another staff member, he was alone subsequently to make the bank deposit.

Wisniewski told police he took approximately $100 a week in 2018, approximately $150 a week from 2019 to 2020, and $250 a week thereafter.

Late last year, hospice hired forensic auditors in the hope of tallying the losses itself, but they came up empty handed.

“The [shop] tills have the ability to record a lot of detail, which we should have been able to access, but he’d turned that off.

“We had someone who came in and would check the systems but what they checked did not pick that up. He was clever.

“It is not as straightforward and simple as it sounds in the way it was read to the court. Mark made it look stunningly simple, it wasn’t,” Rankin insisted.

She also contended that the charity’s previous systems for handling cash weren’t lacking.

“Our audit systems were entirely appropriate… the police will tell you, as they told us, that someone who’s motivated, who has access to cash, will find a way to steal it”.

That said, she notes that the systems have now been strengthened – new security cameras are now trained on the shop tills and the tills themselves have been updated.

“No,” Rankins says, “this crime could not happen here again.”

But she accepts that charities like hers are in a difficult position.

On one hand, there’s tremendous pressure to make money, always scarce, to go as far as possible. In that sense, there’s often a reluctance to spend money on administration and risk management. After all, donors often want to know that every dollar they give goes to a charity’s cause. On the other hand, risks need to be managed.

Hindsight is easy, she says, and with its benefit she can now see that Wisniewski vociferously fought her efforts to update systems for his own, self-serving reasons.

But at the time she simply thought he was concerned about cost.

In the end, Rankin says, it was updated systems that prompted Wisniewski to call it quits.

Months before the fateful October meeting, hospice had introduced new auditing processes and the fresh questions this system was asking were dogging Wisniewski.

“It hadn’t yet alerted us, but there were questions he wasn’t answering, and he knew this would catch up with him a little bit further down the track”.

Details of the Wisniewski case have been circulating in Taupō since the disgraced manager made his first court appearance in February.

Local resident and ethics consultancy director Jane Arnott told the Herald that the fraud is “a crime of opportunity, but also a failure of governance”.

She said that if the hospice had had a “speak up” programme, whereby staff and volunteers could easily voice suspicions, things might have been different.

Both Arnott and several hospice volunteers who previously worked with Wisniewski, noted that he was known to live an outsized lifestyle. The volunteers said this included overseas holidays and the recent purchase of a new electric vehicle.

Wisniewski didn’t respond to a request for comment.

He has agreed to repay $62,600 to the hospice and is due in court for sentencing on July 7.