Filenews 6 March 2021 - byIoanna Mantziepa
They tried to fool the health ministry and get paid for crown tests, which they never documented, some of the private clinical laboratories that were licensed under contract with the ministry. These are molecular coronal detection tests (PCRs). The issue did not go unnoticed by the health ministry, which put the brakes on payments to specific clinical laboratories.
The amount that the Ministry of Health has cut off from invoice payments for PCR tests, reaches €400,000. The information in our newspaper indicates that some clinical laboratories at the beginning of the pandemic stated that they were carrying out PCR tests, they declared them on their invoices, but for them there was no necessary documentation.
As informed by 'F', a specific clinical laboratory carrying out a PCR test at a specific site, had stated the same name of a citizen on three different occasions, with different dates, that he had carried out a coronavirus test.
Another case concerns a clinical laboratory which stated incomplete data of citizens which, during the strict checks of the competent committees of the Ministry of Health, had no confirmed data. A clinical laboratory also stated that a specific person had taken a test, but no result was ever detected for that person.
The director general of the Ministry of Health, Christina Giannakis, told "F" that "before the invoices were paid, we called the clinical laboratories and made reductions in the price charges of PCR tests. Also, after rigorous testing of unconfirmed data in some of the tests, thousands of euros were cut off from some clinical laboratories."
Mrs Giannakis also said that for each payment for these tests, a deep audit was carried out first. She also explained that for these audits there were three-member committees which carried out very strict checks for each laboratory.
It should also be noted that in addition to the strict controls on tariffs, these committees also contacted citizens at random to determine whether they had been tested and whether they were satisfied with the service. Also checked for these tests was done by the accounting department of the Ministry of Health.
