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

mathepac said:
And you know this how? The money is classified as lost in the report.
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Doesn't mean it won't be recovered, you clearly don't have experience in what happens in organisations that turn over multi millions and billions of euro, these things can happen, you need controls in place to prevent it, if they fail you need controls in place to pick it up after the event and rectify. If it has been identified what legitimate supplier is going to say hard luck you won't be getting that back?
 
So the C&AG had no problem with 99.98% of the HSE spending. That's pretty good.

I've no issue with staff being paid more then €500kpa. I'd sooner a top notch doctor being paid properly for his work, not a 2nd rate doctor just to save money.

Stock went out of date, s, happens in every corner shop in the country. And had the HSE not have the stock and there was a need to get vaccines, they'd be pillored as well.

Real issue is the double payment and the write off of the insurance funding, those do need further explaining
 
Forget about HSEsplaining. Systems and processes need to be put in place to prevent double payments to to suppliers, overpayments to staff, waste of supplies, money wasted on under/unutilised capital projects, to recover those losses and arrange for the firing of those responsible for the waste/ losses. €50.4 million is a lot of our money to lose.

Forget about percentages as I said before, look at the absolute numbers, they're staggering, and who's to say the CAAG captured all of the losses? I'd venture to suggest that where there's smoke there's very probably at least one fire.
Peanuts20 said:
I'd sooner a top notch doctor being paid properly for his work
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How do you know the €5.7 million was payments to eleven staff doctors, male or female? The report is about losses, not regular payments.
 
Per the Irish times. I haven’t read the actual report. Likely to be very long and boring.
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The annual report also shows that one HSE employee received just under €700,000 in total payments including basic pay, allowances, overtime and weekend, night duty and on-call fees last year.

A total of 10 HSE staff were paid in excess of €500,000 overall.
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If this is the annual report it’s usual for annual reports to include details of the highest paid staff. It is not usually intended to imply there is an issue with their pay
 
Marsupial said:
It's worth adding that it was the HSE that identified the duplicate payment - not the C&AG.
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Well, top marks to their internal audit unit. The HSE was set up in 1975 and I would have thought in that time period someone would have advised that invoices be checked against purchase order numbers, prior to approving payment. [And if you can make duplicate payments, is there not a risk that uninvoiced payments can be made? Is that not the real risk here?]
 
Peanuts20 said:
I've no issue with staff being paid more then €500kpa. I'd sooner a top notch doctor being paid properly for his work, not a 2nd rate doctor just to save money.
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Just on this - these payments don't reflect someone being "top notch". What's happening is that a consultant in an understaffed specialty is fulfilling his contract (e.g. 39 hours per week). There's meant to be 4 consultants but theres only 2. So once the 39 hours are up, the hospital asks him to work more - e.g. up to 80 hours. He bills them for the hours and thats how you go up to 500k.

Particularly if the guy is locum - he then bills per hour, not getting a salary. The hourly rate is the same as the salaried hourly rate but he has no upper limit, technically.

I'd suggest these amounts are looked at like a barrister - billable hours. The going locum rate now is €133 per hour on site - so if you did 60 hours on site in the week you'd get approx €30,000 gross per month. Add on off site work - maybe a 1 in 2 - with some procedural billing and I can see how you'd get to €500,000 gross p.a.

I'd even say the opposite - the top notch guys won't work those jobs and won't work as locums. They're in well staffed departments. Mind you they're pulling north of half a million through private work but that isn't billed through HSE.
 
mathepac said:
They're not working
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Clearly they are if there is one (in the context of the amounts spent) immaterial double payment identified out of billions of payments out. As i pointed out before you have a series of controls, controls to prevent double payments, controls to identify double payments if they happen and then procedures to recover funds. No internal control in infallible as human error is always a risk.
 
The receiving org had to account for this cash in their bank... their rec team would have queried it too, or potentially applied to oldest invoices. Overall the control preventing duplicate payment failed but the consequences of this control failure are not as severe as say the NTMA issue which was a payment made to an unknown organisation. Even some of that has since been recovered.
 
There is clearly a lot more to this story than the CAAG report is making out - probably a complex dispute of some form or other.

What that is specifically, heaven only knows.

I don't believe it's simply a matter of money mysteriously resting in the wrong account and nobody being too bothered to resolve that.
 
mathepac said:
If the CAAG's report classifies the funds as "lost" then they haven't been recovered, ergo the procedures are not working.
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if they have identified a double payment it cant be lost, it hasnt been recovered yet. Seriously you need to step back a bit and look at this from a wholistic perspective instead of getting worked up over a clickbaity article.
 
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