Erroneous Payment of Financial Assistance to Persons after Death

Dr Chia Shi-Lu asked the Minister for Health in light of the Report of the Auditor-General for FY2013/14 on the Ministry's lapse in continuing to pay $64,000 in financial assistance to 99 people after their deaths, what measures have been taken to ensure that all financial transactions affecting the Ministry will be accurate and secure in the future.

MOH acknowledges the concerns raised by the Auditor-General's Office (AGO) with regard to the over-payment of $64,000 in relation to financial assistance given to Singaporeans under the Interim Disability Assistance Programme for the Elderly (IDAPE). The support given should have ceased upon

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beneficiaries' death.

MOH has since 2002 engaged an external vendor to administer IDAPE. The errors arose mainly due to the administrators' migration of its IT processing system, resulting in the demised list not being updated in certain months. This has since been rectified. MOH has also required the administrator to make improvements in data processing to prevent similar errors from recurring. This includes system enhancements to trigger alerts when there are errors in data processing or uploading. MOH has also sought full reimbursement of the over-payments from the administrator, as provided for under the terms of the IDAPE contract.

MOH views all AGO findings seriously and instituted measures through changes in operating procedures or establishing new Standard Operating Procedures to ensure similar mistakes are prevented in future.

I thank the Minister for his very comprehensive reply. I have two related supplementary questions. The first is, I was hoping the Ministry could give us an idea of the quantity of services of a similar nature which are outsourced. Because I understand this lapse was due to the fact that it was handled by external agencies. So, the first is, perhaps, we could get an idea of the extent to which such types of services are outsourced. And number two, whether the Ministry is actively looking into ways of either reducing the amount of outsourcing that it is using or to maintain the same level, but looking at a more robust way of managing or surveying these outsourced services.

Madam, I do not have in my hand the exact quantity of outsourced services. If the Member is interested, he could file a separate Parliamentary Question and we could try to answer. But I would say that MOH outsources quite a lot of services, for example, hospital services actually are carried out by the corporatised restructured hospitals and the Government provides subvention in a similar way to an outsourced service. For nursing homes, for example, we have adopted a Build-Own-Lease (BOL) model, where we build the infrastructure but we outsource the operation to operators. So, we have quite extensive outsourcing activities.

I agree with the Member that we will continue to find ways to strengthen our outsourcing framework to ensure compliance and strengthen the governance so as to make sure that those who need help will get the help.