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Mega-institute Te Pūkenga is continuing with a multi-million-dollar IT project despite its looming demise.
It said the new finance system will be useful for the institutes that replace it and stopping the project would cause significant cost increases.
Te Pūkenga was created to unite polytechnic-based education and training with work-based industry training and apprenticeships, but the incoming coalition government ordered it in December to stop that work and prepare for disestablishment.
The institute told RNZ it started work on a single finance system for its 25 business divisions in March last year.
"Support, maintenance, and/or replacement of the existing systems over recent years has been poor or non-existent in the former ITP divisions due to lack of investment and resource constraints, with many approaching end-of-life," it said.
"Work on a new system began in March 2023 and was well advanced with contractual commitments for three years when Te Pūkenga received the minister's Letter of Expectation in December that year."
Te Pūkenga said it decided to continue building the platform as "it will be fit for any future entity restructure and will enable a faster move to a new structure than the previous 25 finance systems, which have been challenging from a management and reporting perspective, both on a centralised or dispersed model. Any decision not to proceed and retain current system licences would have resulted in significant cost increases".
"This decision was communicated to the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) and the minister. The total cost of the project is $13.7 million."
It said the project would provide support and security and streamline finance-related tasks like transactions, reporting, budgeting, and forecasting.