Federal COVID-19 vaccine, benefits rollout swift but wasteful: AG

The federal government succeeded in quickly securing and distributing COVID-19 vaccines and rolling out pandemic benefits to help people and backstop the economy, but wasted millions of doses and gave billions in benefits to ineligible recipients, the auditor general of Canada says.

Auditor General Karen Hogan's fall audits, which were released Tuesday, give the government a mixed pandemic report card, saying that while benefit programs were swift and did what they were supposed to do, they were also wasteful and lacked proper verification.

"In 2020, the government decided to rely on information provided by applicants and limit pre-payment controls to expedite helping people and employers affected by the pandemic," Hogan said in a statement. "In doing so, it recognized that there was a risk that some payments would go to ineligible recipients."

The audit of benefits "found that overpayments of $4.6 billion were made to ineligible individuals, and we estimated that at least $27.4 billion of payments to individuals and employers should be investigated further," she said.

Watch: AG report reveals Ottawa overpaid pandemic benefits by $4.6 billion:

Hogan's audit of pandemic benefits warns that while $2.3 billion in overpayments had been recovered by this summer, the federal government may be running out of time to identify and recover the rest because of legislative time limits. 

Legally, the federal government has 36 months from the time benefits are paid to verify the payment was proper, a time frame that can be extended to 72 months if the Canada Revenue Agency suspects recipients provided false information when applying for the benefits.

In its analysis, the auditor general's office looked at:

The audits not only looked at whether the payments were made to eligible recipients, and how well the government later verified if those payments were legitimate, but also how effective the pandemic supports were in achieving their stated goals. 

"The government of Canada set an objective of helping Canadians as quickly as possible. The COVID-19 emergency programs that we audited achieved that objective," the audit said. "They quickly offered financial relief to individuals and employers, prevented a rise in poverty, mitigated income inequalities and helped the economy to recover from the effects of the pandemic."

Canada's gross domestic product took a 17 per cent hit between February and April 2020, shrinking the economy by some $350 billion. But by November 2021, the audit said, the economy was back to pre-pandemic strength. 

The audit also said that without the pandemic supports offered to individuals and businesses, the poverty rate would have almost doubled during the pandemic, from 6.4 per cent to 11.6 per cent.

Those pandemic supports, the audit said, primarily went to lower-income workers who benefited with an increase over their pre-pandemic incomes.

"Overall, these increases in government transfers to households exceeded losses in wages and salaries and self‑employment income," the audit said. "This income compensation through the COVID‑19 programs helped to financially support the population."