Chile’s comptroller general’s office said on Tuesday it expects to deliver an audit of Codelco’s 2025 production data within two months. The audit follows Codelco’s disclosure earlier this month that its 2024 and 2025 production figures appeared to contain artificially inflated output from the Ministro Hales and Salvador divisions, potentially because both mines claimed the same production.
Codelco said on October 6 that the same material may have been recorded as production by more than one division, referred the findings to Chile’s public prosecutor’s office, and commissioned EY to conduct an independent external audit, while KPMG continues a broader review of 2024 and 2025 production reports. An earlier internal audit found that material still requiring further processing had been reported as finished copper production at Chuquicamata and Ministro Hales in 2025, involving about 26,875 tonnes of copper, after which the company dismissed an executive and disciplined others.
The scale at stake is material to the market’s data, not just to the company. Codelco produced 1.41 million tonnes of copper in 2025 including attributable stakes, against 1.44 million tonnes in 2024, and has guided operated production of 1.331 million to 1.357 million tonnes for this year. Ministro Hales originally reported 153,000 tonnes in 2025, a figure the company corrected to 146,000 tonnes in July, while Salvador reported 47,000 tonnes in 2025 against 6,000 tonnes in 2024.
Jurisdiction watch: this is a governance and data integrity case inside a state miner, not a change in mining law, and it arrives while Codelco’s board chair has said the company’s 1.7 million tonne production target for 2030 is unachievable. Until the comptroller and the external audits report, Codelco’s 2024 and 2025 division level figures should be treated as provisional, and any revision will feed directly into Chilean fiscal receipts and the official copper supply record.