TNAG-1415-FCO40-1896-Public-finance-in-Hong-Kong-1985 — Page 175

154.

-

In their

Head 102 Medical and Health Department. Subhead 700 General other non-recurrent. (502). Scheme for private dental treatment for civil servants. Sixth Report issued in December 1983 the Public Accounts Committee expressed great concern over the abuse by a number of civil servants of the scheme for private dental treatment which was set up in 1981 to assist civil servants and their dependants. The Committee regarded the

an extremely serious matter which needed to be dealt with seriously, noting that the Secretary for the Civil Service was investigating cases of suspected abuse and that it was the Secretary's intention to take disciplinary action against individual civil servants where appropriate.

155.

The Secretary for the Civil Service provided the Public Accounts Committee with an interim report in May 1984 and a full report in January 1985. He stated that initial clinical checks of about 6,000 claims were made in 1983 relating to work done by 295 dentists. It was noticed that claims involving certain dentists among this group had given rise to certain problems. All claims relating to these dentists were therefore singled out for further examination, and a total of 4,128 were inves- tigated in detail. The outcome of the investigations was:

claims in order

1,359

-

claims not in order from the procedural point of view (for example, claims submitted for reimbursement before treatment

754

had been completed or before the dentists had been paid)

claims not fully in order from

2,015

the treatment point of view (for

example, all or part of the

treatment recorded by the

dentists had not been done, or

not done sufficiently)

4,128

The irregularities concerning the claims not in order related to a very small number of dentists.