The Federal Government will recover millions of naira wrongly paid to 588 Medical Doctors across the country.

The Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, stated this when he spoke with newsmen in Abuja over the weekend.

Ngige, who fielded questions from State House Correspondents, explained that affected doctors wrongly benefitted from Medical Residency Training Fund meant for particular category of doctors.

He said the names of the doctors were uncovered after a thorough scrutinized of the 8,000 names submitted by Chief Medical Directors of Federal Government health institutions for the training programs. The Minister, however, revealed that a substantial amount of the money had been refunded by some of the affected doctors, while efforts had been intensified to recover the remaining balance.

He maintained that the delay in making the refund by the affected doctors was holding back the Residency Fund payment by the government.

Ngige said: “Ministry of Health has gotten the list of doctors who supposedly are to benefit from the Medical Residency Training Fund.

“Total submission of about 8,000 names were gotten and the Ministry of Health is scrutinizing them.

“We have done the first round of scrutinizing and they will now compare what they have with the Post-Graduate Medical College and the Chief Medical Directors who submitted the names.

“The Association of Resident Doctors, in each of the tertiary centers, worked with the CMDs to produce those names, but now that the names are being verified.

“We discovered that about 2,000 names shouldn’t be there because they don’t have what is called Postgraduate Reference Numbers of National Postgraduate Medical College and (or) that of the West African Postgraduate Medical College.

“So, this is it and that is the only thing holding back the Residency Fund payment because it is there already for… incurred expenditure has been done by the Finance Minister and an it’s in the Accountant-General’s office.

“So, once they verify the authenticity of those they are submitting, the Accountant-General will pay.

“We are doing that verification because we do not want what …