Nigerian gov’t to recover millions of naira wrongly credited to 588 doctors
The Federal Government has commenced moves to recover millions of naira it said was paid in error to 588 medical doctors across the country.
This was disclosed on Sunday by the Minister of Labour and Employment, Sen. Chris Ngige, when he fielded questions from State House correspondents in Abuja.
According to a report by Ripples Nigeria, Ngige explains that affected doctors wrongly benefitted from Medical Residency Training Fund meant for a particular category of doctors.
He said the names of the doctors were uncovered after thorough scrutinisation of the 8,000 names submitted by Chief Medical Directors of Federal Government health institutions for the training programme.
The minister, however, revealed that a substantial amount of the money had been refunded by some of the affected doctors while efforts had been intensified to recover the remaining balance.
He maintained that the delay in making the refund by the affected doctors was holding back the Residency Fund payment by the government.
“The Ministry of Health has gotten the list of doctors who supposedly are to benefit from the Medical Residency Training Fund.
“Total submission of about 8,000 names were gotten and the Ministry of Health is scrutinising them.
“We have done the first round of scrutinisation and they will now compare what they have with the Post-Graduate Medical College and the Chief Medical Directors who submitted the names.
“The Association of Resident Doctors, in each of the tertiary centres, worked with the CMDs to produce those names, but now that the names are being verified.
“We discovered that about 2,000 names shouldn’t be there because they don’t have what is called Postgraduate Reference Numbers of National Postgraduate Medical College and (or) that of the West African Postgraduate Medical College.
“So, this is it and that is the only thing holding back the Residency Fund payment because it is there already for incurred expenditure has been done by the Finance Minister and it’s in the Accountant-General’s office,” he said.
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