When we did our last audit in 2002, we raised a major concern about the use of the social insurance number because, as Mr. Regan mentioned, it is used very much in the private sector and is used in many cases to establish the identity of a person.
We were also concerned with the whole question of theft of identity. If it were very easy to get the card, it would make it easier for people to assume someone else's identity. We encouraged the government to address that issue and to clarify what purpose they saw the social insurance number filling. The response at the time in 2002 was, “The government reaffirmed its policy that the SIN was only an account number for authorized federal programs”. Our status report went on to say that the government, “To help protect personal information...is implementing the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act”.
I would certainly encourage the committee to perhaps re-question the department on that, because it's our understanding that as the government moves forward with Service Canada and one-stop service delivery, the social insurance number is becoming even more key in that whole delivery mechanism.
The integrity of the program or the validity or checking of who actually receives a card is one thing, but with all the cards that have been issued without any check on the authenticity of documents, which happened before 1976, there are discrepancies between the numbers of population and the numbers in the registry. So the integrity of the registry becomes even more important, I believe, which will obviously be an issue that we look at going forward.