Records indicate that the Canada Revenue Agency will spend over half a billion dollars to pursue ineligible claimants for the repayment of pandemic relief checks.According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the cabinet received warnings in 2020 that the Canada Emergency Response Benefit program was vulnerable to abuse.According to the Inquiry of the Ministry tabled in the Commons, the Agency has spent $387.6 million to date on "staff time and resources" to recover incorrect payments.An additional $150 million has been budgeted for debt recovery over the next two years, bringing the total to $537.6 million.Figures were released at the request of New Democrat MP Bonita Zarillo (Port Moody-Coquitlam, BC) who asked, “How much does the government estimate is owed in Canada Emergency Response Benefits and Canada Recovery Benefits?”The Inquiry reported that as of September 29, it had identified $3.56 billion worth of ineligible payments under the Emergency Response Benefit program and an additional $2.3 billion under its successor, the Canada Recovery Benefit.According to the Inquiry, auditors were investigating ineligible claims ranging from as much as $28,000 to as little as a dime.In the early days of the pandemic, on March 25, 2020, Parliament passed the Canada Emergency Response Benefit Act, which provided $2,000 a month to jobless tax filers facing eviction or foreclosure.Applications were accepted online with only “the flimsiest prepayment controls,” Conservative MP Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West, AB), chair of the Commons Government Operations committee, told the House on December 12.“The Liberal cabinet overrode recommendations by the Canada Revenue Agency on setting up more stringent prepayment controls and instead forced the Agency to dole out taxpayers’ dollars based on a mere self-attestation,” said McCauley.Federal managers had previously testified that they cautioned the cabinet that expediting payments with only superficial checks would lead to costly errors.“We knew when we were launching,” Graham Flack, then-deputy minister of employment, testified at 2021 Commons Public Accounts committee hearings.“It wasn’t an error. It was a known design criteria. We knew when we were launching the benefit that it was not possible in the time we had to have real-time reconciliation.”Access to Information records indicated that the Emergency Response Benefit program disbursed $635.9 million to high school students. This included 40,630 claims made by Grade Nine students across the country.Records also revealed unusually high rates of payouts in specific communities. For example, in Old Crow, Yukon, more than half of the adult residents received CERB cheques, even though the district's unemployment rate was 12%.
