It's actually pretty stunning that the department wouldn't try to work through this, especially knowing that even though 2.1 million of the 2.9 million are inactive, that means 800,000 are active.
If the payouts are $70 billion, what that tells me is that if you match that with approximately 5% of your social insurance numbers that may in fact be fraudulent based on those numbers, should even 10% of these fraudulent inactive social insurance numbers be accessing government programs, that adds up to a cost to the treasury of about $300 million. That's assuming it's only 10%. If it's 50%, it's $1.5 billion. Are these the potential levels of costs that we may be facing?