Transparency in CMRF Disbursement After BRS Regime Fraud Detected

Hyderabad: Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy has opted for overhaul of the disbursement method for financial assistance under the Chief Minister Relief Fund (CMRF) to prevent misuse that took place under the previous BRS regime.

The state government spends about Rs 700 crore every year to reimburse the medical expenses to the poor and needy under the CMRF. In the last few weeks, the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) made the entire process of disbursement online except the handing over of cheques physically by the peoples’ representatives – MLAs, MLCs and MPs.

Official sources told Deccan Chronicle that large-scale irregularities took place in CMRF under the previous Bharat Rashtra Samithi regime. Senior bureaucrat in the CMO under the BRS regime, P Rajasekhar Reddy, was in-charge of CMRF and several instances of impersonation of beneficiaries came to fore after the change of guard in the State.

As per the procedure, peoples’ representatives submit applications for reimbursement of medical expenses along with the hospital bills of the patient concerned. The CMO wing handling CMRF has to confirm the genuineness of the bills and the details of the patient before releasing the cheque. Contrary to tall claims of making strides in IT adoption in governance by the BRS, the disbursement process was manual till now.

“We found that in 90 per cent cases, the staff merely recorded that they telephonically contacted the hospital staff, the details of whom was never mentioned in the file, and approved the amount,” a senior official said. In several cases, it was found that the cheques were issued in the name of patients but were never handed over to them and instead encashed by persons with similar names, he added.

Beginning the cleansing process with computerisation of the records, the CMO developed a separate application and gave login credentials to all the peoples’ representatives. In the first stage, the patient’s basic data including aadhaar, phone number, bank account number along with IFSC code and the details of the hospital where the treatment was provided.

A unique registration number will be created and the same would be sent through SMS to the beneficiary with a message that his request is received. The peoples’ representatives will also submit the original records to CMO in physical form. About 4,000 hospitals in the State with inpatient treatment have been brought into the network. The application will be sent online to the respective hospital which should verify its own records and confirm the treatment cost besides the bills issued by them. Once the hospital sends confirmation, the team of doctors at CMO will scrutinise the claims and fix the amount to be reimbursed.

“Finally, the cheque containing not only the name of the patient but the bank account number along with IFSC will be generated and sent to peoples’ representatives who in turn will distribute it to the beneficiary,” the official said adding that at every stage, the beneficiary will be informed of the status through SMS.