By Zakariyya Adaramola & Ojoma Akor

The Executive Secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) Prof Usman Yusuf said 23,000 ghost enrolees were discovered with the help of Information Technology by a team from some Federal Government agencies.

Yusuf disclosed this yesterday at the official presentation of ISO-IEC 20000 certificate to Galaxy Backbone [GBB] by the deputy British High Commission, Harriet Thompson in Abuja.

He said NHIS under him was able to deploy ICT to plug leakages in the disbursement of NHIS funds to Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs) and discovered 23,000 ghost enrolees in the process.

“We have been able to save millions of naira for the Federal Government and this is why the HMOs are after me,” he said.

NHIS General Manager, Media and Public Relations, Abba Zayyan said each enrolee is entitled to N1,000 per month , this amount covers the capitation fee and the fee for services saying “If you multiply N1,000 by 23,000, you will have N23 million per month, if you multiply to a quarter, that is three by N23 million, you will have about N69 million or roughly N70 million. There are four quarters in a year, if you multiply N69 million by 4 you have nothing less than N270 million per annum, and if you multiply based on the number of years the padding started, let’s say since the scheme started, that is 11 years ago, you are going to have close to N3 billion.

“But the relevant department is still computing the actual years when the padding started, as soon as they finish we would be able to come up with the actual figure, because we just discovered these ghost enrolees.”

Dailytrustng