I looked after a patient a few months ago who worked for a branch of our government who picked up her medical bill.
The invoice was paid promptly but to my dismay and secret delight, it was some thousands of dollars more than I’d billed for. Of course I was tempted to keep quiet about it but luckily (“luckily”) my invoicing person picked up the inconsistency and asked me to look into it. My first thought, after sadly dismissing the idea that it was a tip for great service, was that they’d accidentally paid me the invoice for the hospital, or possibly even for the surgeon.
So, I emailed the surgeon’s PA to ask if he’d been paid yet, or if she could shed any light on the matter. Weeks went by and I heard nothing, so I emailed her again. She was surprised that I hadn’t heard from the hospital’s financial team, and said she’d follow it up.
I forgot all about it until I got a rather unnecessarily tetchy email from my invoicing person, who is also my accountant. Could I get this sorted out before the end of the financial year, please? By now I was thinking, well, surely possession is nine tenths of the law…but shamefacedly I went back to the PA, and this time there was a flurry of action. I was added onto an email stream which seemed to mostly consist of finding out what the hell happened, and more importantly, who to blame. Here is a classic line in this sort of self exculpatory, corporate activity:
Another quote further down seems to demonstrate that bureaucracy has learnt to move with the times:
Not so modern was asking me to pay it back online using a badly photocopied bank deposit slip to show the account I was to refund the money into. I could barely make out the digits, and when I tried to pay it with my banking app, I got a warning that the account number didn’t match the account name, and was I certain I wasn’t a victim of a scam as it might be unable to recover the money if I went ahead with the payment. This spooked me so much, that after trying multiple different ways of typing in the name, which the bank never acknowledged was ever more than faintly correct, I gave up and emailed back to ask if they could type out the account number again.
A rapid response gave me a number that was even worse, and was dismissed out of hand by my phone as not even being a proper bank account number, let alone the correct one. I emailed back to say this, with the number I thought it was. They replied to say, yes, I now had the correct one, and had the payment gone through? But, actually, due to a transcribing error on my part, that number was also incorrect. I was sweating bullets by this time, convinced that my money was going to get siphoned off by nefarious person or persons unknown, and I emailed back in despair. This time, they sent an official looking letter where the account was clearly displayed. I’m not sure why they hadn’t sent me that in the first place? I must say, my app still wasn’t entirely happy, with notes in large, bold, red font saying that the name and number didn’t match and was I really really sure? Well, I paid it anyway, and if there’s blow back I’ll know who to blame. Either technology, or that girl who used to work for me but has now left.