Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic Health System recently completed a five-year streamlining of its tax reporting process, but critics say the effort reduced organizational transparency, according to the Post-Bulletin.
Mayo combines its tax returns for all primary campuses across several states, which means the individual financial information for each campus is not available to the public. Activists protesting the system's consolidation of services at its Albert Lea, Minn., campus have called out Mayo for allegedly hiding this information, which could contradict their public narrative of lost profits at the rural hospital
"This change allows Mayo to hide expenses and justify cutting patient services without accountability," Jen Vogt-Erickson, a leader of the Save Our Hospital organization, told the Post-Bulletin. "Mayo expects us to take it at its word that it lost $8 million in Albert Lea and Austin in 2016, when its claim that it lost $4 million in 2015 was contradicted by its 990 form that year. Mayo is putting profits over patients, and trust has been fractured."
Mayo officials say they still maintain financial records for individual campuses, but that those records will not be shared with the public. However, they clarify this is not a tactic used specifically to obscure information for the Albert Lea campus.
"It's not that we're trying to do this just in Albert Lea and Austin," Mayo spokeswoman Ginger Plumbo told the Post-Bulletin. "This all started as an efficiency back in 2011 and they've been pulling sites in the fold along the way. The timing looks like we just did this in Albert Lea because of the controversy, but that's really not the case at all. Instead of filing 70 different tax returns, we just file one."