Canadians who wrongly claimed $2,000 pandemic relief cheques will now face debt collections until 2028, the federal government confirmed, as auditors warn that billions in improper payments remain slow to recover.Blacklock's Reporter says a notice in this year’s budget states funding will go to the Department of Employment to support overpayment collections in collaboration with the Canada Revenue Agency. While identification of mistaken payments ended on March 31, repayment efforts will continue until March 31, 2028.Comptroller General Annie Boudreau told the Senate national finance committee that collections are not meant to cause undue hardship. “When it comes to taking money from the most vulnerable Canadians, that is something the Agency should take into account when it considers collections,” she said..Sen. Claude Carignan (Que.) pointed to the scale of the problem. “It’s a lot of money,” he said, asking if the Canada Revenue Agency had given up on recovering funds from four million debtors and whether political timing — including a possible election — was influencing enforcement. Boudreau said all aspects had been reviewed.The Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) was passed in 2020 to provide $2,000 monthly cheques to jobless taxpayers facing eviction or foreclosure. Originally budgeted at $24 billion, the program ultimately paid out $74.7 billion to 9,047,930 Canadians — nearly half the national workforce at the time. Payments even went to children as young as 15, with records showing $635.9 million paid to 317,900 high schoolers, including 40,630 Grade 9 students..Auditor General Karen Hogan has repeatedly criticized the slow pace of recoveries.“I am concerned about the little amount of post-payment work that’s being carried out,” she told the Commons public accounts committee in 2023.Hogan said repayment obligations range from deliberate fraud to simple confusion, noting that legislation allows roughly 36 months to notify recipients of overpayments, extended in cases of fraud or intentional misrepresentation.Under the current system, she said, “any individual or business that receives something they were not entitled to should pay it back,” leaving the onus on Ottawa to decide how aggressively to pursue collections.
