I will agree with your approach. With any large system or government database schema adding another table and then adding a relation to the necessary reports is 100x better than changing the parent table.

I've seen too often jobs being quoted for clients for simply adding a column to table blow out to 4-5 month development tasks. Turns out the table was being used by an old C/C++ program with oracle C bindings. That had to be updated, and that in turn caused another application to stop working.