HSE staff paid pensions while working

SERIOUS payroll errors at the HSE are allowing staff to work while officially on sick leave, receive pensions while still working, and be paid allowances for children who are far older than claimed.

An internal HSE investigation has found a series of mistakes that are damaging the health service’s already scant budget at a time when frontline services are repeatedly being cut.

Documents seen by the Irish Examiner indicate that, nationally, hundreds of thousands of euro were paid out in error between 2008 and 2009, although an exact figure is not available.

An unpublished internal audit of the HSE South, concluded last year, confirms that:

* A retired academic consultant at University College Cork was given “considerable overpayments” because his pension and lump sum was calculated on the HSE paying 100% of his salary. The health service was in fact paying just 71% of his salary.

* The misreading of a pension order led to an overpayment to a deceased employee’s family of €13,781 between 2005 and 2009.

* The child of a deceased employee was paid €3,727 more than necessary because the HSE believed he was five years younger than his actual age, which would have disqualified him from the payment.

The internal HSE investigation also noted that employees who either left on health grounds or under the voluntary early retirement scheme subsequently returned to work while still receiving their pensions.

In one case, an employee was found to be receiving a full salary while she was employed as a home help worker — despite having retired on a full pension more than two decades previously, in 1988.

Another oversight involved a psychiatric nurse who retired from aMunster-based facility before returning to the position in February 2008.

At the time of the audit, two years later, she was still “receiving the full salary for the grade from which she retired and is also paid her full pension”. The worker has since been “advised of the implications” of this situation.

In addition, while the HSE’s own guidelines specifically state that any pensions for employees who retire on health grounds must be suspended if the employee returns to work, the audit found that “an absence of controls” meant this did not always take place.

The sample issues relate solely to the HSE South, which the internal review noted was “overall” in line with salaries and pension entitlements guidelines.

In both 2008 and 2009, the region handed out a little less than €70 million in superannuation payments — more than €50m of which related to pensions each year.

A separate audit of the HSE Dublin Mid-Leinster area, which was also concluded last year, found that “inappropriate” filing systems risked “needlessly incurring wastage of scarce resources”.

This concern included the sample identification of four allowance payments where approval notices “could not be found at the time of the audit”, and hundreds of allowance payments being given despite the expiry dates having “long since lapsed”.

The figures come at a time when the taxpayer is still paying €100,000 every week on the failed Personnel, Payroll and Related Systems software.

The project was initially meant to cost €8.8m but a series of errors mean its implementation, technical support and other items carry a still-growing price tag of more than €180m.