Canada's auditor general says that while the federal government effectively delivered emergency COVID-19 benefits during the pandemic, deciding to not front-end verification resulted in $4.6 billion in overpayments to ineligible individuals.
The audit notes that, in initially rolling out benefits like the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and the wage subsidy starting in 2020, in order to expedite financial assistance to those who needed it the government chose to rely on attestation information provided by applicants and limited federal pre-payment checks before the funding was provided.
The auditor general found that, in addition to the billions of dollars in overpayments, another estimated $27.4 billion in payments to individuals and employers should be "investigated further" for potential ineligibility, including $15.5 billion that went out through the wage subsidy program. Asked by reporters on Tuesday how much she thinks the overpayments are a result of good-faith mistakes by Canadians versus what may be fraud, Hogan said she couldn’t confidently say because of the limited information the CRA had when she was doing her audit. Hogan is now calling for a series of changes to see as much of the improperly-paid funding returned as possible, including:
The CRA has already suggested, in its response to Hogan, that they won't be going after all of the ineligible funds. The CRA said this is because: "It would not be cost effective nor in keeping with international and industry best practices to pursue 100 per cent of all potentially ineligible claims."
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