THE Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) on Friday, February 21, denied issuing fake receipts to overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in relation to the cases filed against four of its previous and current officials.

In a statement to SunStar Pampanga, PhilHealth president and CEO Ricardo Morales said the unscrupulous act of issuing fake receipts were committed by the liaison officers of recruitment agencies and not by anyone at PhilHealth.

The said fake receipts were issued by these liaison officers themselves for premiums that they collected from unsuspecting OFWs but did not remit to PhilHealth.

Morales said in the statement that with due diligence, PhilHealth reported the incident to the National Bureau of Investigation in 2015 for a more thorough investigation. Since then it has been in constant coordination with the NBI (with whom it has a memorandum of agreement to file appropriate criminal cases should there be any) for guidance on the necessary legal actions to take against the perpetrators.

The state agency also said that contrary to reports that some P16 million were lost due to the said scam, PhilHealth has verified a total of P1.2 million worth of contributions that are with fake receipts.

To date, PhilHealth has recovered a total of P430,000 from these agencies, while the balance is in various stages of recovery.

“To prevent these from happening again, the agency is further strengthening its IT system as well as its coordination with the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration for a mechanism that will assure OFWs that their premium contributions are properly remitted to and accounted for, pursuant to the approval of POEA’s Governing Board on the matter in January 2019,” Morales said. (JTD)