The ACT Opposition has called on Auditor-General Maxine Cooper to launch an urgent inquiry into the government's management of emergency department data.
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The request was made after the government confirmed misleading data on median wait times would be corrected with quarterly reports reissued with notifications later this week.
ACT Health Minister Simon Corbell said he was "very disappointed" by the errors that he described as isolated, unintentional and administrative in nature.
Median wait times at emergency departments during July-December 2013 have been repeatedly changed by ACT Health in recent years.
On first mention, the wait time was reported as 34 minutes but this changed to 39 minutes and 36 minutes in subsequent years amid record presentations.
The breakdown for urgent, semi-urgent and non-urgent presentations also changed in 2015 with no explanation provided in government reports or media statements.
Mr Corbell told The Canberra Times the errors made hospitals performances seem worse and dismissed any suggestion that data had been deliberately manipulated as "mischievous" and "simply politics".
But Mr Hanson refused to rule out any deliberate manipulation of data and said the directorate had a history of changing data to improve performances.
He said the changes, found in quarterly ACT Health reports, allowed the government to claim wait times had remained relatively stable, rather than increasing by 8 per cent.
"It is the very fact that the old data was made to look worse that is the problem," he said.
In a letter to Dr Cooper, Mr Hanson said the errors involved the same data set her office had investigated twice since 2012.
"The discovery of these errors in itself is serious enough but is all the more damaging when viewed in the light of your recent findings," he said.
Mr Hanson called on the auditor-general to determine who changed the data, whether it was intentional and how it happened on multiple occasions.
He also called for Dr Cooper to determine whether incorrect data had been supplied to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and whether any additional changes had been made.
Mr Corbell has dismissed the Opposition's attempt to link the errors to the deliberate tampering of more than 11,000 emergency department patient records to improve performance during 2009-11 as "clutching at straws" and dishonest.
"What occurred then was falsification at the data entry point," he said. "What has occurred here is a processing error in two isolated instances."
Mr Corbell said ACT Health would ensure three people checked and verified data before future public release. It is not known whether the public servants involved have been disciplined, with any decision left to the directorate.
"It will be up to the auditor-general to determine whether she will undertake an audit," he said.
"However, since these issues with the quarterly reports were raised, processes have been put in place to ensure these errors are not repeated."
