SCOPA grills DOH
When the Limpopo Department of Health (DOH) walked out of the Standing Committee On Public Account (Scopa) hearing last week, there was no doubt that health in Limpopo looked very bleak.
POLOKWANE -This was according to the chairperson of the committee, Snowy Kennedy. A lack of record keeping was at the heart of most of the issues the Scopa on Health raised last week.
The department received a regression to a qualified opinion in the last audit of 2016 with several concerns by the Auditor General (AG). MEC for Health, Dr Phophi Ramathuba, mentioned record keeping and capturing of patient data along with the overtime being paid out too easily to doctors as her main concerns and challenges. This comes after several reports in the AG’s findings pointed out there is no accurate record keeping in the department.
Kennedy said there is no records that the department has any form of control on patients and the medication they receive which is an area of grave concern.
Scopa member, Elias Nong, said the record keeping of patients system should work as a bank. When you come to the first facility they should capture your details and from there a patient must remain on the system no mater where they go.
The MEC’s reasons for the lack of record keeping are that there was not enough money to upgrade the current systems along with the incompetence of people in various positions within the department.
The committee raised issues on the inability of revenue collection, poor asset management and the department’s lack of action taken against officials found wanting as their biggest concerns.
According to the AG report, the department does not have an adequate system in place for the recording and collection of revenue. This means that underlining accounting records could not be reconciled for amounts disclosed in the department’s financial records.
Because of this, the AG was unable to determine whether any adjustment of the departmental revenue, stated at R579,6 million of the financial statements, was necessary. Furthermore an impairment provision for occurred departmental revenue amounting to R19,3 million was incurred as a result of the department failing to collect amounts billed for services rendered. The committee also demanded that the department write a letter of apology to the AG for writing in one of their responses that there was no proper communication from the AG.
The MEC stated that there was an issue with information on movable assets that had been given to the AG but was never taken into account while doing the asset register on movable tangible capital assets and minor assets. Kennedy said this was evidently coming from the Department of Health, even during the hearing, and not from the side of the AG as the department failed several times to only read their given responses.
During the hearing a Scopa member reads a question on the findings of the AG and a department official then needs to only read the written response back to the committee, which the HOD, Dr Peter Kgaphole, failed to do several times.
Scopa members Nong and Rudolph Phala dismissed Kgaphole and asked CFO, Justice Mudau, to read the answers instead.
After the hearing, Kennedy told BONUS the biggest issues found in the department was the fact that the HOD did not seem competent in his position whereas the CFO had all the answers the committee was looking for. She said one major concern was that in the past years the department had been found wanting in the area of revenue collection, something that added to the reasons the department got a regression according to the MEC. “They plan to fix this by throwing another R26 million at their problem and recruiting another company to collect revenue on their behalf. This is not the way forward. We as Scopa believe the Department of Health should join the Department of Education under Section 18 because they are struggling and need to be monitored,” Kennedy said. The Scopa hearings will continue on the other departments into the first week of February.
