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.