Govt clarification on Missing Medical Data runs into trouble.

by Staff Writer 04-09-2021 | 9:57 PM

COLOMBO (News 1st); Sri Lanka’s Medicines Regulatory Authority (NMRA) is embroiled in one of the nation’s biggest missing data scandals, with government-side attempts to offer an explanation running into immediate trouble today.

Several ruling-party MPs held a Press Conference today following a ‘fact-finding’ mission, intended on uncovering information on the #DataScam that saw thousands of files disappear from the Government Cloud.

The MP’s stressed that while some 5,000+ files had gone missing, ‘files’ connected to Covid-19 were “safe”, as they had not been uploaded to the cloud, and instead had been “manually” registered and stored. This flies in the face of an earlier publicized decision by the NMRA itself, that informed potential suppliers that it would not be accepting any physical applications, and all applications needed to be made digitally.

Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) representative Pubudu Jayagoda, speaking to the media pointed out that this explanation was contradictory, which raised questions on its sincerity.

“This is a joke. Government MP’s are now telling us that Covid-related data was not entered into the cloud and instead written manually. They can now use this to justify any lie. The very fact that the government is saying this, is reason to suspect a massive scam took place”, noted the FSP frontliner.

On the 09th of August, it was reported that multiple files of the NMRA stored in the Lanka Government Cloud, had mysteriously disappeared. A criminal inquiry is also underway into the disappearance of these files, led by the Criminal Investigations Department (CID).

The ICTA (Information Communication Technology Agency) of Sri Lanka, which consulted or administered the NMRA Cloud migration, has remained tight-lipped on the scandal so far. The Chairman of ‘Epic Technology Group’, the company that executed the solution for the NMRA has gone on the record stating that one of its engineers had accidently deleted a folder.

Industry experts however point out that this does not explain the mysterious reasons behind selectively leaving out ‘Covid related’ data from being uploaded to the Cloud in the first place.