Chapter 2591 - Investigation (Part 18)
Though the season in Guangzhou remained pleasant, the air inside every office of the inspection team's building had grown suffocating. Staff crowded together, periodically sighing and scratching their heads in frustration.
Mountains of ledgers and documents towered on desks. The rain-like clatter of abacus beads mingled with the whirring of hand-cranked calculators, adding to the collective irritation.
Several dozen accountants and auditors had been crammed into these offices, working in three rotating shifts to review documentation around the clock.
Provincial-Hong Kong General Hospital hadn't been open that many years, yet the accumulated archives were staggering. Before the Lingao Pharmaceutical Company was established, the hospital had also handled Lingao drug wholesale and retail operations—a business that began the very day the hospital opened its doors, back when this was still Ming territory. Drug sales had once been the health sector's largest revenue source. Only after the State Council mandated the separation of medicine from medical care and established Lingao Pharmaceuticals as the general agent did Provincial-Hong Kong General Hospital cease its drug sales business. By then, Guangzhou had already been liberated.
One could only imagine how many accounts had accumulated over those years. Worse still, early ledger registration and filing had never been standardized. Some ledgers used abbreviated dates—determining the specific year required its own investigation.
"My blood pressure's going through the roof." A young woman vigorously scratched at her hair. Naturalized citizen cadres had taken to using catchphrases the Elders had brought with them—though sometimes the expressions didn't quite fit the situation.
"Relax, relax. You've got plenty of hair. No need to worry about going bald."
...
Zheng Mingjiang held a summary meeting every day, with each team reporting their current progress and findings. From the portions audited so far, only Provincial-Hong Kong General Hospital barely passed—like a university exam graded to exactly sixty points, not half a point more or less.
The first challenge the inspection team faced was deciphering the notorious phenomenon of "doctor's handwriting." Though Lingao's medical education system was limited in scope, it had emphasized from the very beginning that all archive writing must be legible. Ugly handwriting was acceptable, but it had to be clear.
In the old timeline, Lin Qiaozhi's medical record writing had been exemplary in its clarity. However, under heavy workloads, doctors inevitably grew accustomed to using cursive script, shorthand symbols, and other abbreviations to lighten their burden. Over time, these scrawls became nearly indecipherable.
Senate-governed hospitals had also absorbed physicians who'd received traditional medical education before their modern training. Some retained old habits, giving medicines alternative names to increase prescription confidentiality. Others, proud of their classical education, deliberately showed off with elaborate cursive calligraphy. Of course, not all doctor's handwriting was synonymous with arcane scripture—Fu Shan, for instance, was also a renowned calligrapher. Unfortunately, he had not yet come under the Senate's wing.
To solve the handwriting identification problem, Zheng Mingjiang borrowed licensed pharmacists from Provincial-Hong Kong General Hospital's pharmacy department to assist the inspection—their work a mixture of educated guessing and methodical deciphering.
The second challenge was that most naturalized citizens had no concept of "quality systems" in their minds. This required the subtle, gradual education of an industrialized society—something achieved over time, not overnight. Even though schools and teaching Elders repeatedly emphasized it, naturalized citizens instinctively dismissed such practices as "troublesome." The Senate's factories had taught naturalized citizens what "following work instructions" truly meant only through multiple bloody accidents. Consequently, most ledgers couldn't even reach the stage of detail verification—because they contained no details at all. A large portion of medical records, prescriptions, and accounts had clearly been hastily fabricated after Zheng Mingjiang announced the audit. They held almost no inspection value.
"All of these will be processed as untraceable, lacking original records, and document fraud." Zheng Mingjiang intended to teach the naturalized citizens a deep lesson.
The team members' main complaint was that the various archives universally contained contradictory content, confused logic, and incomprehensible entries. But their job wasn't simply to determine non-compliance and flag problems—they had to sift through the mess and find valuable leads to guide the case toward resolution.
Yet reality proved stubborn. The massive volume of data was like a hopelessly tangled ball of thread, with no loose end in sight to begin unraveling. In the old timeline, various statistical tools would have been available—analysis software that could quickly identify suspicious points. But the Senate couldn't even provide naturalized citizens with the simplest Excel spreadsheet. Manual calculation undoubtedly multiplied the audit's difficulty.
Analyze, record suspicious points, analyze, record leads... After this process, the already mountainous archives generated even more archives. Human brains, unlike computers, couldn't conduct linked analysis or remember every detail—the team relied entirely on daily meetings for communication and synthesis. Low efficiency was inevitable.
Though the audit situation remained murky, Zheng Mingjiang wasn't overly worried. The health sector had never conducted such a thorough, systematic audit before—the opponent's forgery methods were necessarily crude, perhaps even amateurish. Problems would be easy to find.
Once they'd been audited more often, they'd learn to prepare ledgers meticulously according to audit regulations and accounting rules. Then the submitted materials would appear compliant everywhere—yet everywhere would reveal subtle strangeness. To uncover the truth, investigators would have no choice but to keep extending audits and expanding the scope of inquiry. Sometimes you'd clearly sense the other party had problems but couldn't find evidence, forced to watch them slip away.
Ultimately, the current apparent chaos and confusion actually meant the opponent had exposed weaknesses everywhere. Once the mess was sorted out, those vulnerabilities could be immediately seized upon.
After several consecutive days of work, Zheng Mingjiang assigned the team's next priorities: "First, focus on verifying prescription issuance times, pharmacy dispensing times, and Lingao shipping times—look for any connections. Second, verify total drugs requested versus total drugs received versus total drugs dispensed, compared against Lingao's total shipped quantities—identify the gaps. Third, verify whether any prescription forms from outside Provincial-Hong Kong General Hospital have been mixed in among the prescriptions. This third point especially—everyone must verify carefully!"
The first two priorities had already uncovered many problems and leads, but they remained too jumbled to parse. Some issues weren't necessarily corruption—merely inadequate implementation of the management system. With time having passed, thorough investigation had become impossible. But the third point was clear-cut fraud. As long as outside hospital prescriptions were found mixed among Provincial-Hong Kong General Hospital prescriptions, it proved deliberate deception. Through the prescription issuers and prescription flows, the entire chain of complicity could be excavated.
Through tireless effort, after several weeks of sorting, Cheka finally produced an audit issues summary report—accompanied by a thick "problem list" bound into fifteen volumes.
"Medical record, prescription, and accounting management is chaotic, with no correspondence between systems. Late bookkeeping and discrepancies between accounts and physical inventory are common problems. The responsible personnel themselves don't know where things went. Such loopholes are easily discovered and exploited by malicious actors.
"Combined with this batch of allocated drugs' distribution, we inspected relevant accounts in departments and pharmacy, discovering many problems. For example, in warehouse entry registration and receipt counterfoils, the relevant item numbers, batch numbers, and quantities don't correspond to actual warehouse items—some fields are even left blank. These drugs simply don't exist in hospital accounts. Additionally, within the hospital, drugs are received but never registered, causing drugs that exist on paper to not exist in reality. Furthermore, drugs that are received and registered are later returned to the pharmacy department but never re-registered for storage.
"Some patients are admitted frequently, with drug quantities prescribed far exceeding recommended dosages and treatment cycles in the diagnostic guidelines—yet no consultation records exist. Some patients' names are blurry and illegible; registered addresses cannot be verified; some don't even exist in household registration archives. Hospitalized patients exceed bed capacity; outpatient numbers far exceed registration numbers; prescription dates don't match doctors' duty schedules—some were written during leave periods or external training."
Though manual bookkeeping inevitably produced a degree of chaos, the problems currently audited far exceeded normal tolerance ranges.
Zheng Mingjiang had expected all this. It seemed shocking at first glance, but none of it was particularly valuable for solving the current drug case—only useful as future improvement directions.
The truly valuable content came later: among the prescription forms retained in the pharmacy, large numbers of prescriptions from outside hospitals had indeed appeared.
The quantity was enormous. What auditors had sorted so far totaled over a thousand forms, and a complete thorough sorting would undoubtedly find even more. But this number alone was enough to astonish Zheng Mingjiang.
These prescription forms, aside from different serial numbers, were identical to Provincial-Hong Kong General Hospital forms. Without specifically comparing serial number stubs, no one would discover anything amiss—they were all genuine forms, just ones that shouldn't have been here.
The drugs the pharmacy had dispensed according to these prescription forms were undoubtedly part of the leaked supply. A rough tally showed these "genuine fake prescriptions" had extracted roughly thirty percent of antibiotics, twenty-five percent of opiate-containing drugs, and eighteen percent of other drugs from Provincial-Hong Kong General Hospital's pharmacy.
No wonder Provincial-Hong Kong General Hospital ranked among the top three drug consumers yet constantly faced shortage problems—even Lin Motian had become stingy when prescribing. One-third of antibiotics hadn't been used clinically at all! Zheng Mingjiang reflected grimly: the internal management system really did have significant loopholes.
These prescription forms had an obvious vulnerability. Though serial numbers differentiated each medical institution, in actual operation, manual dispensing and bookkeeping couldn't catch this discrepancy. That would require computers and networks. Apparently, in the future, they'd need to adopt some old methods—printing the relevant medical institution's name directly on prescription forms, making identification possible at a glance.
If even Provincial-Hong Kong General Hospital, with an Elder in residence and the strictest management system, was like this, the conditions at other institutions could only be imagined.
(End of Chapter)