Over-invoicing of housekeeping and security services for 70 government hospitals across the State has reportedly caused a loss of ₹35 crore to the exchequer.
According to a report by Arappor Iyakkam, an NGO, the violations include deliberate alteration of tender conditions, favouritism in awarding tenders, manpower over-invoicing, maintaining fake attendance registers and payment of low salaries to workers leading to bribery in government hospitals by contractors.
The corruption and violations started right from the tender stage in 2016 and the illegalities continued till the end of the three-year contract, said Arappor Iyakkam convener Jayaram Venkatesan.
It started with the Department of Health and Family Welfare outsourcing the services. The massive corruption and brazen flouting of regulations had continued in spite of numerous complaints and evidence submitted to the DVAC and the Department of Health and Family Welfare, he alleged.
“I first submitted a complaint to the DVAC on January 9, 2017, providing the facts of the case and the evidence about the irregularities and violations in the outsourcing of services. After the first complaint, I have sent many representations and visited the DVAC office multiple times to follow-up on the case,” he said.
“The over-invoicing amount has been extrapolated for three years for nearly 70 hospitals, which works out to at least ₹35 crore. The service provider has purposefully inflated the bills during billing even though the attendance records they received from the managers for credit of salary shows a lower attendance,” said Mr. Venkatesan.
Evidence for 10 hospitals
Giving out detailed calculations and evidence for 10 hospitals, Mr.Venkatesan said the evidence gathered by them clearly suggested that the over-invoicing violated the tender conditions and resulted in unjust enrichment of the contractor, loss to the exchequer and poor quality of service in government hospitals.
He also alleged that unauthorised diversion of on-duty housekeeping and security staff from government hospitals to private hospitals had also affected services. After the housekeeping and security staff sign their attendance in the government hospitals, some of them were quietly sent to private hospitals during working hours. However, this diversion was not recorded in their attendance and payment for this diverted staff was collected from the Directorate of Medical Education, he alleged.
Two registers
Explaining the modus operandi, he said that at each hospital, the supervisor maintained two separate registers for recording daily attendance and all the housekeeping and security staff were asked to sign in both the registers.
One register recorded the actual staff at the hospital for each day. The service provider used this register to pay salaries to workers based on the attendance and names recorded in the register. “This attendance record is kept confidential and is not shown during inspections. The other register shows inflated, fake attendance,” he alleged.
“Names of non-existing workers were added along with the people who were actually working in the hospital. In other words, the register has random names of people who exist only on record but have not worked in the hospital. This register is used as the basis for calculating salaries by the DME," he said, releasing a report of the NGO's findings.
As evidence, Arappor Iyakkam presented copies of both types of attendance registers for the Institute of Child Health and Hospitals for Children (ICH), Chennai for April 2019 for a few dates. “This fake attendance is happening across many hospitals in which the housekeeping services are outsourced,” he said.
