The federal government is still struggling to ensure that certain “hard-to-reach” populations, such as Indigenous communities, can benefit from key support benefits such as the Canada child benefit, concludes the auditor general.
In a report filed Tuesday, Karen Hogan’s office examines efforts to increase take-up of the child benefit, guaranteed income supplement, Canada workers benefit and Canada learning bond.
The Auditor General found that the government was not ensuring that vulnerable people actually had access to these assistance programs.
Most of these programs require recipients to have filed a tax return, which can be difficult for some, such as seniors, youth, Indigenous people and newcomers — especially those living in remote areas or who have a language barrier.
The Canada Revenue Agency and the Department of Employment and Social Development spent more than $18 million in the past fiscal year on targeted outreach activities to help these people access the benefits they have the right.
But the auditor finds that Ottawa had no effective way to measure whether these efforts had a real effect.
“They could not measure the increase in the rate of use of benefits among the targeted groups over time or other related effects, such as the increase in the number of tax returns filed by these same groups over time” , reads the report.
“Without measuring the impact of their outreach efforts targeting certain groups or locations, the department and agency were sometimes unable to show that the funds spent on these activities had contributed to removing barriers and increasing rates of use of services among target populations. »
No “global action plan”
The government doesn’t even have a clear idea of the size of the benefit utilization gap, because it doesn’t account for people who haven’t filed taxes, the auditor found.
In 2017, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) estimated that more than 10% of Canadians who were supposed to file their taxes did not, meaning there could be many more people who do not receive the benefits to which they are entitled.
The Auditor General’s report indicates that the government does not have a “comprehensive action plan to better measure the use of benefits”. The government invested in data collection in 2018 and Employment and Social Development launched a strategy to measure benefit take-up in 2021, but the auditor found no tangible progress has been made since.
The Auditor General also found that “service-oriented strategies aimed at helping people who needed a higher than average level of support to overcome barriers and meet government requirements in order to obtain benefits were not sufficiently integrated” between the Revenue Agency and the Ministry of Social Development.
In one case, the department launched a pilot project to directly reach people who were referred by community groups as needing additional help. A department official could thus help these people to apply for the Guaranteed Income Supplement, for example, but this same official could not respond to issues related to the Canada Revenue Agency.
“This finding matters because asking the most vulnerable people in society to meet the complex requirements of two separate federal agencies can be a barrier to getting benefits,” the report reads.
The government has indicated that it accepts the auditor’s three recommendations aimed at breaking down silos between departments and agencies, improving the way they measure the use of benefits and the impact of their reach, and simplifying the process access for candidates.