"A letter written to The Straits Times in April last year by the chairman of its Children's Medical Fund board, Dr Gerard Chuah, had claimed that the NKF had 3,000 patients.
Mr Singh pointed out the number had been overstated by about 1,000.
Mr Durai said he realised there was a mistake only after the letter had been published, but had not corrected it.
Mr Singh asked: 'So in addition to the travel and the reserves, we now know that even the number of patients that were being put out as being treated by NKF was erroneous and remains uncorrected; right?'
'Yes,' Mr Durai replied.
When asked why he had done nothing to correct it, he said: 'It was an oversight. I did not think it was of material importance. The donor gives us money because of the brand of the NKF and I did not think it was so important at that point of time to correct this error.'
Mr Singh suggested that the number had been inflated to create a false impression of need. In fact, according to Mr Khaw's reply to Parliament last year, NKF's 'share' of kidney patients in Singapore had dropped, from 54 per cent in 1999 to 44 in 2003.
Mr Durai maintained that NKF had not deliberately set out to create a false impression to attract more funds. He also disagreed that the failure of the NKF management to correct the errors amounted to mismanagement.
'Whatever we did was to grow the programmes,' he said. 'We did it not with deliberateness to deceive anyone at all.' "
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