We were approaching the end of the fiscal year, and I realized that there were quotas. Every month, we would receive report cards congratulating us, for example, on having saved $370,000 in employment insurance and we were told that we had to make further efforts. The report cards came from a very senior manager somewhere in Edmonton, a very highly ranked official in charge of everything. He would send us report cards to congratulate us on our good work, as we had saved a certain amount of money for the government, and he would tell us that we had to increase the savings achieved in employment insurance to $500,000. Those report cards clearly indicated what was expected of us. Each investigator had to achieve savings of $40,000 a month, or $485,000 a year. It was very clear.
As it was the end of the fiscal year and they wanted us to save a great deal of money quickly before the year was out, we received weekly emails reminding us to identify cases involving penalties or violations. We were told that, if we found any such cases, we had to send the information as soon as possible, so that it would be recorded before the end of the fiscal year. It was a race for savings. It no longer had anything to do with a service we provide to Canadians who apply for employment insurance. It was no longer a matter of ensuring that they met the criteria, but rather of figuring out whether they were trying to defraud the system. The main concern was to determine how much money we could help the government save.