KEY POINTS:
A rest home owner attended the funerals of her elderly patients to pay her respects - then stole the identities of the dead to obtain more than $300,000.
In one case, the woman kept a patient alive on paper for more than six years, claiming almost $30,000 in Government subsidies.
In total she claimed $309,857 in subsidies for 13 dead patients.
Her crimes were uncovered during a routine audit in March last year at the Auckland rest home she has owned for more than 15 years.
And on Monday the woman, who has name suppression, was sentenced to 18 months in jail.
Age Concern's Auckland executive officer, Grant Withers, described the crime as "despicable" and said it was a breach of the trust that went with running a rest home.
"It's a robbery, misappropriation, call it what you like, but this person should have gone away for longer," he said.
The case - understood to be the second of its kind in the past year - has prompted the Ministry of Health to tighten its auditing procedures for New Zealand's 900 rest homes and geriatric hospitals.
The woman pleaded guilty to six charges of obtaining by deception and 10 charges of using a document for pecuniary advantage. The charges covered seven years.
The court heard she had not told HealthPAC Dunedin - a business unit of the Ministry of Health - about the deaths of her patients and continued to collect Government subsidies for their care.
The woman told the court she made fraudulent claims because of a cashflow problem at the rest home.
She said she always seemed to be waiting for money and was always waiting for a fee increase that never came. She admitted she deliberately wrote down incorrect death dates.
She would have known the date of death of every patient and had gone to most of their funerals.
HealthPAC group manager Quentin Wilson said providers were audited, and since this case procedures had been tightened.
He refused to comment on how the woman had got away with the fraud for so long.
Families of the dead patients had not been told what had happened because "it's not part of our current process to do that".
The woman is in custody awaiting the result of an application for home detention.
She is to reappear in Waitakere District Court in a month for a name suppression hearing.
The name of the rest home is also suppressed.
Crown prosecutor Simon Mount said he opposed name suppression at Monday's hearing on the grounds of open justice.
But the defendant argued that publication of her name would cause distress to the residents at the rest home and their families and would harm the home's reputation.
The judge continued interim name suppression for a month to give the rest home time to make submissions in support of suppression.
Healthcare Providers New Zealand's chief executive, Martin Taylor, said situations like this case were "fortunately very rare".
"But there's always one rotten apple like this," he said.
He said the HealthPAC audits were "obviously working well".
"I'm happy the system worked and caught someone who was misappropriating public funds and now that person is being held accountable."
