This fall, the federal government pinched several dozen other officials from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) who received amounts from the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) in defiance of the rules they themselves administered. .
“To date, 185 Agency employees who inappropriately touched the CERB are no longer employed,” CRA spokesperson Nina Ioussoupova said in an update on the internal investigation. launched this year.
The CERB was a federal program established during the COVID-19 pandemic to compensate workers up to $500 per week who had to be absent from their jobs.
The program was administered by the Canadian Revenue Agency. It ended more than three years ago, being replaced by another pandemic program in October 2020.
This is almost a third of the approximately 600 ARC employees examined by the internal investigation who had something to reproach themselves for. The government agency indicates that 116 targeted employees were in fact eligible for the CERB, such as those on temporary contracts or students hired before being laid off because of the virus.
The internal investigation is ongoing for the rest of the federal aid recipients who were also on the regular payroll of the organization that distributed these checks. The Agency had already announced that it had fired 120 of these offending employees in September, while demanding reimbursements.
“The actions of some must in no way call into question the integrity and honesty of the thousands of employees who work in an exemplary manner within the Agency in the service of their fellow citizens,” the Agency specified in time to launch the checks this summer.
Last year, Canada’s Auditor General concluded that $4.6 billion in CERB was overpaid. She strongly advised the government to take a closer look at $27.4 billion in pandemic benefits for other anomalies.
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