What we did find here was that the Canada Revenue Agency and the Department of Finance worked in really tight timelines to design a wage subsidy, one that's never been seen in Canada before. The goal of that subsidy was to try to maintain the employer-employee relationship, to keep individuals working and to allow businesses to be better prepared for the reboot of the economy.
The focus in this case, as well as for the Canada emergency response benefit, was on getting payments out in a timely way. The government chose what is known as an international best practice in emergency situations: to focus less on prepayment controls—which it typically would do to vet eligibility and applications—get money out in order to provide support, and focus on post-payment controls. That just underscores the importance of the post-payment work and why, for both of these programs, my office will go back and do audits to look at that post-payment work.
When they chose not to ask for those social insurance numbers in the example you asked about, it was for a few reasons. One reason that this decision highlighted was the fact that their IT systems had some weaknesses, and they couldn't handle some of the data and the cross-comparability. Another was a lack of timely tax information, in that they weren't able to vet revenues from the prior years beforehand since so many filers had not filed, for example, their GST returns, which would have provided evidence of revenues the year before in order to demonstrate a decline in revenues.
Really, the decision was made by the Canada Revenue Agency to prioritize support and to deal with all of these potential issues through post-payment verification work. They've noted that it will take several years to get through this work, and that is why we will be auditing it early on to make sure that it has some good controls and some good mechanisms in place.