NURSING HOME REFUNDS:THE FINAL amount to be paid out by the State in nursing home refunds to those who were illegally charged over the years will be less than half the original estimate of €1 billion, the C&AG report says. It was not possible to be definitive about the reasons for the low number of applications for refunds, but a number of factors seemed to play a part.
These included the fact that the level of documentation required may have inhibited claims; in some cases there were no next of kin; taxation issues may have arisen; and it was possible some did not seek a repayment because they were satisfied with the level of care received.
A number of legal actions over the repayments are pending, and these could ultimately impact on the final cost and timely closure of the scheme, the report adds.
It also reveals that over €344,000 which claimants were entitled to in refunds has been donated back to the State to improve care for those in nursing homes.
PUBLIC SERVICE PENSIONS
IT WILL cost more than €116 billion to pay for public service pensions in the years ahead, the report reveals. However, if the cost of additional accrued liabilities arising from the integration of the State pension into overall pension benefits, which was introduced by the Government for staff employed after April 1995, is taken into account, the total cost of funding accrued pension benefits to those in the public service would be €129 billion.
The report says the aggregate pension payments arising from liabilities will be spread over 60 years or more into the future. The largest liability arises in the education sector where the bill for paying for the pensions of teachers, special needs assistants and non-teaching staff in schools is estimated at nearly €31 billion.
The report says one-third of the value of the National Pensions Reserve Fund – it had a value of more than €22 billion at the end of 2009 – has been notionally allocated towards the cost of public service pensions, with the balance going towards the cost of providing the State pension.
It says the pension levy introduced by the Government for public service staff in March 2009 cut the exchequer pay bill by €837 million.
WELFARE FRAUD
MORE FREQUENT “fraud and error” surveys should be carried out by the Department of Social Protection for control purposes and to demonstrate the department’s “accountability”, the report states.
Surveys already carried out show a “significant problem of excess, and therefore irregular, payment in relation to many of the welfare payment schemes it operates”, it adds.
It points out that “conservative assumptions” about excess payments in schemes that were not reviewed were 3.4 per cent of total expenditure last year.
The State’s financial watchdog also criticised the department when it detected a significant number of excess payments for “failing to record the financial implications of payment reductions or claim terminations”.
The report says “overpayments are not recorded in all such cases and therefore do not represent a reliable measure of the financial impact of the irregular payments in a year”.
SOCIAL HOUSING
THE SLOW uptake of a Department of the Environment social housing leasing scheme can be attributed to local authorities being focused on selling rather than renting their vacant stock of affordable homes, the Comptroller and Auditor General said.
Only 47 of the 175 units approved for long-term leasing by the department were fully operational in June of this year, he said.
The department decided to begin leasing rather than purchasing properties last year in an attempt to meet the State’s social housing needs and deliver a target of 27,000 new units agreed under the Towards 2016 social partnership agreement.
The department put the slow start to the scheme down to lead-in time for any new initiative and the fact that not all properties available to it were suitable.
“The department has also stated that the depressed financial markets together with the inclusion of a large number of property developments in the Nama process has militated against uptake of leasing arrangements,” the report says.
The report concludes that the cost of leasing and purchasing were broadly the same. He said the department needed to evaluate the long-term costs of the scheme as the changes occurred in the property market.
“The department needs to better classify social housing outputs and, in particular, cease the practice of including rental accommodation scheme type arrangements within leasing statistics and report on the numbers leased separately,” it says.
NURSING
SOME €44 million was spent by the Health Service Executive on agency nurses last year, according to the CAG’s annual report. However it found there were cheaper ways of employing extra nurses. For example, it said, two Dublin hospitals – St James’s and Beaumont – have their own nurse banks with the names of available nurses on file.
The finance department at St James’s found it was up to 16 per cent cheaper to employ a nurse-bank nurse while Beaumont estimated savings of 17 per cent could be made by using the nurse bank.
The CAG John Buckley said it may be possible to use this nurse bank concept across the hospital system, not just for recruiting temporary nurses, but also healthcare assistants. His report also says an internal HSE audit in the southern region last year found the cost of utilising agency staff could be up to 36.5 per cent higher than the cost of employing HSE staff. It also found some nurses supplied by agencies were on career breaks from the HSE which contravened the terms of the career break scheme.