Ministry keeps South Ostrobothnia’s 2025 funding unchanged

Finland’s Ministry of Finance will not revise the 2025 funding for the South Ostrobothnia wellbeing services county after reviewing the effect of disputed diagnosis data, Yle reports.

The ministry reconsidered the decision after Vaasa Administrative Court ruled in September that it must assess whether the data affected the county’s funding calculation and, if necessary, change the calculation and decision. The county has estimated it lost millions of euros because diagnosis information was recorded incorrectly.

The case concerns 2022 diagnosis data the county submitted to the care notification register on 14 October 2024. The register is maintained by the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare.

The ministry said it worked with the institute to assess the data’s impact, but the register retains only its latest version and cannot reliably retrieve records as they stood at a specific earlier date. The assessment used a special extract of 2022 data held in the register on 28 February 2025. It included diagnosis data submitted by all wellbeing services counties after the 31 May 2024 data freeze.

The ministry described the assessment as a rough estimate of the scale of the effect on funding across all counties. It said a more precise review is no longer technically possible, and that the exact register data required to correct the funding decision is unavailable. The decision therefore stands.

South Ostrobothnia can appeal the decision to an administrative court. It has also appealed its 2026 funding. New rules on correcting errors in funding data will apply from 2027, allowing clear errors with a significant effect on one or more counties’ funding to be addressed.