The investigation began following a complaint that pointed to billing anomalies between public hospitals and those under private management. The basis of this complaint was an audit from 2022 that analyzed settlements for the 2018 fiscal year between the privately managed Hospital de Villalba and the Madrid Health Service (Sermas).
According to the report, most of the settlements sent by the hospital were accepted, while more than half of those submitted by Sermas did not receive validation for collection. The Public Prosecutor's Office indicated that these incidents could be related to deficiencies in the completion of medical records by healthcare personnel, an essential requirement for validating certain payments according to the Inter-Center Billing Manual.
The complaint also referred to a journalistic report from February, which claimed that the Community of Madrid had stopped claiming more than 71 million euros from privately managed hospitals since 2017.
“"The complaint does not specify management actions that could lead to accounting liability nor does it provide evidence of effective economic harm to public coffers."
The Prosecutor's Office's statement concludes that the accusations extrapolate the conclusions of a specific audit, referring to a single hospital and a specific year, to the entire model of privatized management hospitals. It considers that this seeks to promote a general audit that exceeds the competencies of the accounting jurisdiction of the Court of Accounts.
