Healthcare costs - not insurance "Tens of millions in HSE money lost, say auditors"

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mathepac

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Headline on the front page of today’s Irish Times, the summary low lights:
  • Two separate parts of the HSE paid a supplier over €700,000 for the same invoice. The Comptroller and Auditor General noted the overpayment had not been recovered.
  • An “asset”* constructed at a cost of €1.4 million was never used for its intended purpose. This “asset” was written off last year at a cost of €800,000
  • €4 million in payments due from health insurers never claimed in time was written off
  • Auditors and the HSE estimate another €4.1 million in losses in unsubmitted and delayed claims from insurers
  • One HSE employee was paid just under €700,000 last year
  • Ten HSE staff were paid in excess of €500,000
  • PPE and vaccines worth about €33 million went out of date and were written off
  • The HSE also paid out €2.1 million to store obsolete supplies.
  • The supplier above who was paid twice, received €15 million up to last year. The report raises concerns about procurements and expenditure controls. Different HSE units were invoiced from time to time
Any comments?

What are we paying these HSE employees for?

*quotation marks used in IT report
 
mathepac said:
Two separate parts of the HSE paid a supplier over €700,000 for the same invoice. The Comptroller and Auditor General noted the overpayment had not been recovered.
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Why not?

This supplier has received 15million from the state to date.

Have they exhausted all avenues to retrieving this money and if so presumably the HSE has put them on a block list.

Presuming of course they've qualified 3 or more similar suppliers but that suggests a belt and braces efficient professional procurement dept....

Has legal action been instigated?

This drives me nuts.
 
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Me too.

We lost / wasted all this money, we never recovered any of it apparently and no-one got fired, because no-one was in charge.

@Dr Strangelove, is it that percentage-wise the numbers don't matter in comparison to the overalll budget? I think the level of waste /loss highlighted is frightening.
 
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A quick tot on the head-line numbers here comes to €50.4 millions, a sizeable chunk of change by any measure and no sign or mention of any recovery plans or plans to stop a repeat in following years. A "thundering disgrace" as a famous politician once said in the house.
 
mathepac said:
@Dr Strangelove, is it that percentage-wise the numbers don't matter in comparison to the overalll budget? I think the level of waste /loss highlighted is frightening.
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My point is that the finest financial control systems will inevitably display error under audit scrutiny.

It’s very easy for a journalist to get cheap copy and undermine the work of completely honest people.
 
In your view then the report is just "cheap copy"? Nothing to see here, nothing to be concerned about, no follow-up actions warranted, move on.
 
Perhaps they are all just individual one off incidents, did they all happen in one year? Has there been any root cause analysis?

Some like failure to claim refunds from insurers I feel are more likely to be systemic.

I worked in a Uk hospital trust decades ago. The processes for recovery from BUPA were beyond complex so errors and omissions happened. It was a heavily manual system, with reliance on one key individual, when he went on leave or was off sick it fell apart. So fixing it was simple enough but it took an outside agency (auditor) to point it out and report up the chain before it was sorted.

Overpayments to staff? I’m sure staff would shout if they were underpaid, maybe more than 10 earn €500k+? I haven’t read the full report.
 
Nothing new in this, the same issues existed in the Health Board days.

I was told of one project form back in the day where they archived invoices and payments on to 'computer'. When the system was delivered, the top brass came to have a look at it. A random PO number was plucked out of the air and entered. Two payment records came up on the screen. There were red faces! At first they thought it was a problem with the data in the system. Apon investigation it was discovered the supplier had been paid twice.
 
Towger said:
Nothing new in this, the same issues existed in the Health Board days.
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You make my point for me Waste, waste and more waste. Nothing changes, no improvements, the numbers just get bigger, same old, same old and no-one is surprised or affronted, "Ah sure that's just the way things are!" I say that's not good enough, we deserve better.
 

Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General

The Office's mission is to provide independent assurance that public funds and resources are used in accordance with the law, managed to good effect and properly accounted for, and to contribute to improvement in public administration.
www.gov.ie

Perhaps more worryingly it seems the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General is failing in its mission, again.
 
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Blackrock1 said:
But it is,
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No it isn't and clearly you haven't read either the newspaper report or the CAAG's so you're not in a position to contradict me. The newspaper report states that PPE "worth about €22 million" and "vaccines to the value of about €11 million were written off because they were out of date". I added the two numbers to summarise.
 
Do you want the hse to wait and buy ppe vaccines one at a time as needed or make a plan to estimate requirements in advance ?
 
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