Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Madam Auditor General, thank you for your work.
I want to drill down on a specific area of disagreement between you and the government. The government has said it is not interested in developing the kind of post-payment verification system you recommend. It's not interested in following up in every case. It has tried to give the impression that it's all very vulnerable, disadvantaged people who might be impacted if the government tried to recover the money that was given to those who were ineligible.
The reality is, from my reading of your report, that we don't know anything about the people who received money who are ineligible, in the sense that some of them could be very privileged, well-off people who in fact still cashed government cheques during the pandemic and didn't meet criteria.
What you're calling for is not necessarily that at a policy level we insist on recovering money from every single individual. What you're calling for is that the government do the post-payment work it promised to do, and then, once it has that information, that it then identify what the policy is going to be going forward.
Am I correct in understanding where the area of disagreement is here?