The agency has continued to develop its verification plan using the available information, but this plan has kept evolving and has always taken into account the context of the pandemic and the possibility of doing checks.
As recommended by the Auditor General, we needed to continue our efforts with respect to pre-payment verification where possible, which we did. We delayed the start of the post-payment checks because we focused our efforts on improving our pre-payment processes to ensure that money was paid only to people who were eligible for the subsidy or assistance programs. That's what we've done over the last year.
In the Auditor General's report, paragraph 6.57 talked about efforts to freeze the accounts of people who had made high-risk transactions, where we suspected fraud. So we continued that work. At that time, 141,000 accounts were blocked and we focused more attention on those accounts. That work has now been done for over 580,000 accounts.
In the last few months, the agency has focused its efforts on pre-payment verifications. I think it is important for the agency to reiterate, as we did in writing last Friday, that we still have the information on the payments that have been made. We intend to establish a comprehensive verification plan to do those where there are risks, to ensure that there has been no fraud and that the amounts that were paid were conveyed to people or companies that were eligible for the programs.