A Parliamentary Committee has been told that multiple investigations into the allegation that documents were missing or altered in CommInsure’s medical document tracking system have given the insurer a clean bill of health.
Answering a question on notice from the Parliamentary Joint Committee into the life insurance industry, the Commonwealth Bank’s insurance arm claimed both its own investigations and those of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) had cleared it of any failings.
“Multiple investigations into the allegation that documents were missing or altered have been completed,” the banking group’s answer said. “CommInsure is satisfied that there is no evidence to substantiate it.”
Dealing with the question on notice, the Comminsure response said, “allegations have been made about the integrity of CommInsure’s medical document management system. The allegations that documents were missing or altered related to CommInsure’s Medical Officers Referral Database, which was used by CommInsure’s medical officers’ team to track workflow of internal medical opinions”.
It said investigations conducted at the time these allegations were made concluded that all expected data was in the database, with the exception of a single document, and that the document was manually re-entered into the system so that it duplicated the opinion held on the case file.
“Based on these investigations, we did not find any evidence of medical files being intentionally deleted or tampered with resulting in missing information, as has been alleged,” it said. “The CommInsure Board subsequently commissioned an independent review into this allegation. The board is satisfied there is no evidence to substantiate the allegation.”
The answer then went on to cite an Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) report published in March which stated the regulator “…did not find any evidence to suggest that medical opinions stored on the database were deleted or altered by staff outside the Medical Risk Team, other than for appropriate administrative functions”.
