Qld Health IT debacle left suppliers $170m in the lurch

More than 1300 businesses were kept waiting for payments from Queensland Health after its troubled hospital ordering system went live.

HUNDREDS of businesses were left waiting for almost $170 million in late payments from Queensland Health just months after a troubled hospital ordering system went live.

The Courier-Mail can reveal 1385 businesses were paid late by the Department of Health, amounting to $169.8 million over just a three-month period between October 1 and December 31 last year.

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This was almost triple the $57.4 million in late payments made during the same quarter the year before.

The highest outstanding amount to a single business was $976,000, with the average amount of late payments for affected businesses reaching just over $122,000.

The delayed payments came just months after the department went live with its S/4HANA hospital ordering system, which had crashed just two hours after it was launched on August 1.

It is understood the system had some impact on payments being made on time in the last quarter of 2019. Late payments totalling tens of millions of dollars were made in quarters before the system began.

In a statement, a QH spokeswoman insisted it valued “each and every supplier” and understood the pressures they operated under.

“However, this is balanced with a responsibility to the Queensland taxpayer and means invoices must be checked and meet strict accounting criteria, accounting for every single dollar matters,” she said.

“Queensland Health payment time frames are improving all the time. For example, during April and May 2020, payments were made within 37 days on average.”

The spokeswoman said the department processed thousands of invoices from suppliers every week, with total payment figures often reaching into the tens of millions of dollars.

The Government was unable to confirm if any small businesses were affected by the late payments.

LNP health spokeswoman Ros Bates said it was “staggering” that the Government had ran up almost $170 million in late payments in three months from only one department.

“These numbers show that small and medium-sized businesses simply don't matter to Labor,” she said. “The Palaszczuk Labor Government should be setting an example to the rest of Queensland instead of milking firms that depend on a steady cash flow.”

During the same quarter in 2013, late payments reached $90.2 million – about $79 million less than in 2019 – before increasing to $150.6 million in the first quarter of 2014.