The federal government has begun writing off millions of dollars in Canada Emergency Response Benefit payments made to ineligible recipients, though it refuses to say how much taxpayers ultimately lost.Blacklock's Reporter says Employment and Social Development Canada told the Senate national finance committee that while efforts have been made to recover funds, a large portion is now considered unrecoverable due to communication failures, financial hardship, or recipients having died with no estate.Managers said the government knowingly approved payments with limited verification during the early months of the pandemic. “The government was fully aware of the risks,” said a departmental report, which emphasized a “risk-based integrity framework” that prioritized quick delivery over real-time checks..The report said $3.23 billion in CERB payments went to nearly 1.9 million people who were already receiving Employment Insurance and were therefore ineligible. As of March 31, 1.69 million recipients had fully or partially repaid their debt, but an unspecified amount remains lost.“Taken together these amounts total approximately $2.71 billion which includes both funds that have already been repaid and those that are no longer recoverable,” the report said.Officials said delays in notifying recipients of overpayments, undelivered mail, or financial hardship made some debts legally uncollectible..Former deputy minister Graham Flack told MPs in 2021 that the risks were known from the start. “It wasn’t an error,” he said. “We knew when we were launching the benefit that it was not possible in the time we had to have real-time reconciliation.”The CERB program was passed by Parliament on March 25, 2020, and intended to provide $2,000 monthly to Canadians who had lost income due to COVID-19. Initially budgeted at $24 billion, the program ultimately paid out $81.6 billion. The reason for the overrun remains undocumented by any parliamentary committee despite multiple audits..Conservative MP Kelly McCauley said at the time that the government owed Canadians transparency. “People were losing their homes and really needed help but claims were made by others who were ineligible or didn’t really need it,” he said. “I want the government to do a proper, transparent audit of this.”Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux acknowledged the risk of fraud was known. “There is no doubt that when creating a program as quickly as we did, there is going to be some abuse of that program,” he told the Commons in 2021.
