I don't think there's a difference of opinion. The Auditor General is correct. For example, the top line number of 150,000 as potential fraud is correct. The IRCC, at the time, hadn't done the homework to distill that to the number of actual fraud, so the Auditor General was 100% correct, there are potentially 153,000 cases.
We've subsequently done the homework and have brought the number down significantly. We now believe that 22% of those cases are potential fraud cases. We have more work to do to determine who, within that reduced population, has actually left the country. That's something we need to do more systematically going forward.
From my perspective, there's no daylight between the OAG's findings and ours. Had we documented and done the work that we've now done at the time, she would have had a different number, I believe.
