NHIA welcomes Auditor-General’s report

Sylvester Mensah, Chief executive of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), has said his outfit had already adequately addressed the adverse findings against the Authority in the Auditor- General’s report for the period January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2009 and called on the media to be circumspect in their publication of the said report.

“It is easier to pick and choose portions of the report and sensationalise them in the media to make it look as though the Authority cannot account for some money or has misappropriated some funds under my watch; but that would be wickedly misleading and preventable if the persons running with the report had taken time to study it properly.

“The report covers the period January 2008 to December 2009—a period of 24 months. I took office as Chief Executive in June 2009 and straight away we detected structural and administrative deficiencies in the system and without delay, we set up measures to address these deficiencies. Many of the issues raised in the report are issues we ourselves realised not long after I became Chief Executive and we took action against the culprits and set up measures to prevent its recurrence.

But the media is not the appropriate platform for me to fully discuss the Auditor-General’s report on the Authority,” Mr Mensah told DAILY GUIDE when the paper contacted him over the subject on yesterday.

The Chief Executive said he was prepared to meet the Public Accounts Committee to answer questions on the report and discuss the fine details of the findings because “the Authority has nothing to hide.”

“The lifting of portions of the Auditor-General’s report and just throwing them out in the media creates a wrong perception of corruption. But it is even worse when the issue is sensationalised and misinterpreted as the cause of the delay in payment to the schemes just to cause an unfair public disaffection for us.

“Since we took office we have worked to make the system more efficient, retrieve monies that had gone into private pockets through dubious means, reported persons found to have behaved fraudulently to the police and some of them prosecuted in the law courts,” Mr Mensah added.

He said there was not a single supposed adverse finding in the report that his outfit could not give the requisite and satisfactory answers to.

“We detected these findings through our Clinical Audits long ago but we decided to act on them rather than make them public simply because they did not occur under my watch. It is not for fun that other countries troop to Ghana to learn from us and adapt our system,” Mr Mensah articulated.