The federal government has taken so long to find at least thirty billion dollars in benefits linked to COVID-19 suspected of having been overpaid that it could permanently lose its money, warns the auditor general.
“I am concerned about the lack of rigor in post-payment verification and collection activities,” Auditor General Karen Hogan said in her report released Tuesday.
The federal government has traced $4.6 billion in emergency payments made to people who were ineligible, and has managed to recover about half of that amount as of this summer. However, the Auditor General adds to this burden at least $27.4 billion in benefits that should have been audited by the government.
She arrived at this account by adding together the $8.3 billion paid to the 627,000 recipients who had earned less than $5,000 the previous year, which was an eligibility requirement for personal assistance programs, and the 3.8 billion paid to the 1.4 million beneficiaries who earned too much money to qualify.
Added to this is about 15.5 billion paid in the form of wage subsidies to companies whose finances had not been hit enough by the COVID-19 pandemic to be eligible for public aid.
The strategy the federal government has used to disburse emergency aid more quickly has been to disburse the money first, and then verify applicants’ eligibility after the disbursement. It is this second part that has been lacking, according to Ms. Hogan’s analysis.
“The collection activities of the Canada Revenue Agency […] were limited to answering calls from beneficiaries who wanted to make a refund,” she criticizes in her report.
Moreover, the government “could run out of time” to recover all those billions already pocketed, in some cases for more than two years now. The law prescribes tight deadlines for verifying the eligibility of beneficiaries, a maximum of 72 months in the most extreme cases of fraud or misleading information.
The Auditor General also finds that COVID-19 programs have achieved their goal of quickly rebounding the Canadian economy to its pre-pandemic level. Without the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), the Canada Economic Recovery Benefit (CRB) or the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, in particular, “the poverty rate in Canada would have reached 11.6% in 2020, or more than five percentage points more than the observed rate of 6.4%.
Pandemic aid programs cost an estimated $211 billion.
In another report filed on Tuesday, Karen Hogan criticizes the poor sharing of information between the federal government and the provinces, which according to her has caused the loss of millions of doses of vaccine against COVID-19.
As reported The duty in September, almost 14 million doses of vaccine intended for donation reached their expiry date before they could be offered to other countries. Of the 169 million doses of vaccine obtained, 84 million have been administered and another 32.5 million are still stored in federal or provincial vaults.