Troubled hospital payment system has now cost taxpayers $33.5m

QUEENSLAND Health was warned twice it was not ready to launch a trouble-plagued hospital payment system that resulted in $540m in late payments, $6.5m in overpayments and a $33.5m blowout for taxpayers.

Shocking new details around the botched S/4HANA project have been laid bare in a scathing report that shows the Palaszczuk government shelled out $3.1m frantically trying to fix problems while publicly maintaining things were not that bad.

Auditor-General Brendan Worrall’s investigation found the project management team was warned twice just a month before its August 1 launch – including by Mr Worrall himself – that the program wasn’t ready.

QH executives reported they were ready when they weren’t and had not trained staff in the new system.

That included only 41 per cent of “superusers” attending training in the month before the disastrous rollout.

But the audit also uncovered previously unknown fraud risks that allowed users to alter payment details and then delete them – meaning people could funnel QH funds into their own bank accounts and then cover their tracks.

The audit found the new program constantly froze, was often delayed and users were unable to access the system at all on eight occasions.

QH had to double its memory and processing capacity to fix issues. The system couldn’t read invoices properly, rejecting 481,800 of them in the first year, scanners in warehouses didn’t work properly and untrained staff were making problems worse.

The problems resulted in $540m paid late to suppliers in the first three months.