Federal government deposited nearly $26 million in the wrong bank accounts last year

The federal government deposited nearly $26 million into the wrong bank accounts during the last fiscal year — and more than $10 million of it may be gone for good.

According to figures tabled in the House of Commons, the government sent 22,170 direct deposits to the wrong bank accounts between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021. In the previous fiscal year, it deposited 9,619 payments worth a total $6.6 million into the wrong accounts.

The number of cases reported during the 2020-2021 fiscal year is the highest since at least 2012. The total amount paid into the wrong accounts — $25.9 million — is much higher than the figure reported for the previous year and is the second largest annual amount of misdirected cash reported since at least 2009.

While the government was able to recover $7.1 million in misdirected payments last year, another mislaid $10.2 million is listed in government documents as "not expected to be recovered." The government says it hopes to chase down and recover another $8.6 million in coming years.

The largest single payment misdirected last year — for $3.5 million — was recovered by the federal government.

With billions of dollars in federal government direct deposit payments of all types being made each year, a small percentage of them inevitably end up in the wrong places.

But for those waiting on money from Ottawa, misdirected payments can cause headaches and hardship.

Conservative Treasury Board critic Kelly McCauley said his office has received a lot of calls from constituents whose benefit payments never arrived and who couldn't get through to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), which oversees many pandemic benefit programs.

"The difficulty was trying to get through to CRA for months and months," said McCauley, MP for Edmonton West.

The government says the spike in the number of payments going astray is due to the large rise in the number of payments going to individual Canadians because of the pandemic.

"There was a significant increase in payments issued from April 1, 2020 up to March 31, 2021 to individuals and businesses as a result of the actions taken by the government to support hardship created by the COVID-19 pandemic," wrote Stéphanie Hamel, spokesperson for Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC). The department includes the Receiver General's office, which oversees government payments.

"In 2020 to 2021, the Receiver General issued 405 million direct deposits for a value of $494 billion," Hamel continued. "This represents an annual increase of 35 per cent and 56 per cent respectively."

Hamel said the misdirected deposits amounted to only 0.0053 per cent of the total paid out.

In a briefing binder prepared for a committee appearance in March 2020, PSPC said the percentage of direct deposit money that had been misdirected was 0.002 per cent of the total in 2018-2019 and 0.003 per cent in 2017-2018.