IGG probes ‘fraud’ at National Medical Stores

The Inspector General of Government, Ms Beti Kamya, has through her inspectors commenced an investigation into the operations of the National Medical Stores (NMS), a government agency responsible to procure, store and distribute drugs to public health facilities.

The investigation targets the way the drugs are procured, stored, and distributed to different government health centres and later the balance [expired] is returned for destruction by NMS.

Ms Munira Ali, the spokesperson of the Inspectorate of Government (IG), yesterday told this publication that their team has already commenced scrutinising the documents that were obtained from NMS last week.

On Friday June 2, a team from the IG led by Ms Kamya, while performing their inspectorate role, stormed the NMS headquarters in Kajansi, Wakiso District.

“We have come here to investigate how you run your operations for the last two financial years in different areas of procurement and disposal of drugs, storing drugs, transport management and Finance and Administration, and Human Resource Department, because there has been a lot of public outcry outside there over lack of drugs in health centres yet we hear NMS are burning drugs,” she said.

Annually, the NMS through, the National Drug Authority (NDA) burns unspecified volumes of expired drugs.

Mr Abiaz Rwamwiri, the head of public relations at NDA, told this newspaper that they always destroy the drugs on the invitation of the NMS.

“We don’t have specific statistics of the number of drugs that are destroyed annually, but what I can say is that, for example, last week, we destroyed a big consignment which included HIV drugs,” he said.

Mandate

NDA, he said, is mandated to supervise the destruction of the drugs safely.

“NMS collect most of these pharmaceuticals from the regional health centre and bring them to the centre for destruction and for us, we get a stockpile or whether there is a change for example last year in HIV, there was a change in dosage molecule by the World Health Organisation, we look at the kind of the pharmaceuticals they have and they keep the statistics,” he added.

Ms Munira said their team are revising the documents they retrieved from the stores, “and apparently we don’t have the statistics yet, but we shall avail as soon as our team is done.”

  She added that some of the documents retrieved are from the stores department including; copies of the distribution lists, list of recipients, complete list of beneficiaries, goods received over the last two years, returns from recipients, criteria of distribution and the annual distribution report.

Other documents

The IGG team also got documents from the procurement department, which include the pre-qualified and medical supplies, adverts that were given out, evaluation reports, award letters, contract agreements, a report on the disposal of expired drugs, a copy of the disposal policy, and the procurement of other goods and services.

In addition, she requested copies of the transport policy, the number of vehicles, the total number of drivers, the fuel management policy, the list of garages contracted to repair the vehicles, and the entire work plan from the transport department.

The IGG asked the NMS chief human resource manager to avail her team with copies of the staff establishment payroll, attendance register and the human resource manual.

“We won’t be asking questions for now, but we just want those documents which we shall go and verify and afterwards this will determine whether we launch a full-scale investigation,” Ms Kamya said.

“We went to do a spot because we did not announce our search or receive any invitation. We want to know the finance system and how drugs are released and managed. We have also heard of numerous issues on inflated payroll at the human resource desk,” she added.

Healthy probe

Mr Kamabare welcomed the investigations, stating that any outcome will be taken into consideration by his management.

“We receive resources on behalf of the people of Uganda, so she (IGG) came to see if there is anything we are not doing well. If there are any challenges that they find out, we shall see how they advise and follow up on them,” he said.

Ms Kamya said the investigation will cover the last two financial years of FY2021/2022 and FY2022/2023.

Background

     In February 2023, the NMS was blamed by the general public for the consistent lack of drugs in government hospitals. They (NMS) in response blamed the Finance ministry for constraining their operations with limited funding. In the next financial year, the NMS has been allocated Shs513 billion, which Mr Kamabare says is not enough to enable them to deliver effectively.