“The Government of Canada set an objective of helping Canadians as quickly as possible,” read the performance audit, adding, “To expedite issuing payments, the Canada Revenue Agency [CRA] and Employment and Social Development Canada [ESDC] relied on personal attestations.”
The report also said federal departments decided to “focus less on confirming the eligibility of applicants up front and more on reviewing eligibility after payments were issued and recovering overpayments or payments made to ineligible recipients.”
This resulted in relief payments going out to a large number of Canadians now known to be ineligible and an even greater number of individuals whose eligibility status is still unknown.
Previous Report
Hogan’s figures differ slightly from the amount cabinet declared in a recent Inquiry of Ministry tabled in the House of Commons, which said that $5.3 billion worth of COVID relief payments were sent to ineligible recipients.Hogan’s performance audit tabled in the House today further said that federal departments should’ve planned for more post-payment eligibility checks to ensure that ineligible recipients be required to return the relief money they collected.
“Given the limited pre‑payment controls and the early decision to focus on post‑payment verifications, we expected the department and the agency to perform extensive post‑payment verifications to identify payments made to ineligible recipients.”
Cabinet said in a previous Inquiry of Ministry that the federal government has attempted to recoup some of its losses from ineligible COVID relief payments.
Going Repayment
Federal ministers today responded to the auditor general’s report tabled in the House.Minister of Employment Carla Qualtrough addressed the large amount of COVID payments that went out to ineligible recipients during the pandemic, saying they “kept the economy afloat at a time of unprecedented risk.”
Qualtrough said the process of verifying whether or not recipients were eligible “remains ongoing” and said ESDC has sent out over 50,000 letters to “potentially ineligible recipients requesting proof of eligibility.”
“We’ve also issued 1.8 million overpayment notices to individuals to reconcile advanced payments of emergency benefits and we’ve recovered $1.3 billion to date,” Qualtrough said.
“We have a strong plan to conduct post-payment verification and we are carrying out this work methodically.”