Thank you. I'm happy to respond to that question.
First off, I have to say thank you for the kind words. In my job, I don't get a lot of compliments. We try to do the best job we can.
On the issue of privacy breaches, we're not happy that we weren't able to provide those to the Privacy Commissioner on a more timely basis. To understand the context we were dealing with and what led to that, in the early days of the pandemic, there was a fairly massive incident that affected not just the CRA but also others. We had a lot of privacy breaches that came out of that. As the minister indicated, at that time, our focus was on protecting the accounts and money involved. It wasn't as if we waited for three years to do something about it; we were doing a whole bunch of things to make sure we were blocking accounts. We were talking to taxpayers and finding out what happened. Often, it's not easy to figure out if there was or wasn't fraud. That took time, and we worked through it.
I would note that the OAG looked at this issue, and we reported on this in that OAG report. We said, in July 2022, that we had 23,000 cases for $131 million. It wasn't as if there were nothing being reported, but we did not get them to the Privacy Commissioner in a timely way. We have now done that. We're all caught up on the 31,000 cases you referenced. I would expect that, having worked through it, we will now see a more regular strain. We are still getting frauds. We are still getting privacy breaches, but we're working on them, and I think they'll be in a more normal zone.
We have a relationship with the Privacy Commissioner where we can tell his office about things that are happening informally, so they can be prepared for it. Our commitment now is to get those privacy breaches to the Privacy Commissioner in a more timely way while we work on the cases.