Employees at Algiers’ Social Security Fund forge 16000 medical files to steal patients' money

Algiers Criminal Court postponed the case of embezzlement of nearly 3 billion centimes from the Social Security Fund in Belouizdad, in which officials in the fund are implicated after they forged 16000 medical files of patients who are benefit from insurance services.

Officials who are implicated forged the patients’ files at the services of the archives of payment centers, represented in the files of maternity holidays, illness rest periods and prescriptions which prices of their drugs exceed 5000 ZDZ, and then re-used them after damaging the original documents, and replaced them with fake medical files to take advantage of sums of compensation through withdrawing them using postal deeds.

The process caused significant material damage at the Social Security Fund of Belouizdad, which was set by judicial experience at One billion and 700 million centimes, which made the accused, notably the Head of the Fund, his Secretary, an employee and seven other officials, commit criminal embezzlement on public funds, a misdemeanor of forgery by counterfeiting documents, using them and participating in the embezzlement of public funds.

One of the case details, which returned after the Supreme Court accepted appeal in the previous provisions, is that the defendants asked the rest of employees, especially the new to sign fake medical files without review, taking advantage of the lack of control during the period from 1997 to 2000.

Main accused, who are the chairman of the Fund (DJ. P) denied what is attributed to him, asserting that he is the third person who signed on the payment document and did not embezzle any sum of money, even though the rest of the defendants said he is the responsible for that act, adding that he was preparing the files and asked them to sign them each according to his powers, while the Secretary of the Fund, confirmed that the fake files that have been discovered, were not of his prerogative, and that the amounts were paid to the beneficiaries (patients).