Consultants cost taxpayers millions over paperwork

DOCTORS at one of the country’s largest hospitals are costing the taxpayer millions of euro by failing to fill out private patient paperwork, which is then wrongly written off as “bad debt”.

Documents obtained by the Irish Examiner under the Freedom of Information Act show 18 consultants at the Midland Regional Hospital in Mullingar are inadvertently adding to the taxpayers’ problems due to the delays.

A HSE internal audit into the facility has found that, at the end of 2010, €1.6 million in invoices had yet to be submitted to insurance firms for work carried out on private inpatients.

The figure relates to 1,589 invoices for private patient work, including 892 from 2010, 226 from 2009, 230 from 2008, 127 from 2007, 66 from 2006 and 48 from 2005 — more than half a decade ago.

According to the internal investigation, the delays were the direct result of ignoring “urgent” letters from management, putting the wrong insurance company name on the document and failing to fully fill out the invoices.

As a result, in many cases the costs had been incorrectly written off as “bad debt” by the hospital as the costs had not been reimbursed from private insurance firms.

Of the €1.6m involved, a massive €411,049.13c related to just one temporary consultant who was still working at the facility when the audit took place.

Between 2008 and the end of 2010, this individual failed to send off 210 invoices, with the cost accounting for more than 25% of the total expense.

While this doctor was working at Mullingar, he was not registered on the Medical Council of Ireland’s list for the specialist field where he worked — a move which must normally take place for safety reasons before a medic begins employment.

After learning of this situation, which was contributing to the delays, one insurance company wrote to then HSE national human resources director, Seán McGrath.

The letter said the firm may not be responsible for the €411,049.13c cost connected to this doctor under insurance legislation — leaving the taxpayer to pay for the expense due to the registration error.

A total of €1.234m of the overall invoice delay cost at the facility was also linked to just five consultants, the audit found.

These were doctors responsible for 210 invoices costing €411,049.13c; 388 invoices (€318,194); 411 invoices (€271,098); 75 invoices (€118,187); and 165 invoices (€115,906).

In correspondence to the hospital seen by the audit team, insurance firms have stated they will not honour invoices which are more than six years old.

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