The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) reported to Parliament that the Intermediate and Long-Term Care (ILTC) information system was not able to compute the quarterly subsidies payable to the ILTC institutions because of system bugs.

The Ministry of Health (MOH) had implemented, in May 2009, a new Intermediate and Long-Term Care (ILTC) information system to compute the quarterly subsidy payable to each ILTC institution.

The capital cost for the system is $1.95 million and the average annual recurrent cost is $337,000.

The committee noted that one year after its implementation, the ILTC information system was still not able to compute the quarterly subsidies payable to the ILTC institutions because of system bugs.

This led to under-disbursement of subsidies (estimated at $200,000) to five out of the six nursing homes test-checked by the Auditor-General's Office (AGO).

However, the Permanent Secretary of MOH informed the committee that the key system bugs have been rectified by 30 September 2010 to allow the quarterly subsidies to be correctly computed and disbursed for normal cases.

For a small number of cases where special rules have to be applied to compute the subsidy, the target date for the vendor to fix the system is 28 February 2011.

In the meantime, temporary manual workaround solutions are used to ensure that the correct subsidy is paid.

MOH also said that adjustments to make up for the past under-disbursements were completed on 11 November 2010.