Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll go to one of my colleagues to provide some details, but I think what I've said thus far is that it was not feasible in practice to do that and still respect our ability to get the benefits out the door in a timely way. To build the IT system to be able to use that information and incorporate it was going to push us off course.

Public Accounts committee  Again, I'll ask Ted to respond to that, but obviously employees in an enterprise change over time. Even if we had that information, how relevant it would be at that moment would be a consideration. I think the point that Mr. Gallivan made is an important one. We've been focusing on the SINs, and that was a decision we made, but we had a bunch of other things that we talked about at the time.

Public Accounts committee  I can elaborate in concept. We are going to look at this area to see.... We have a delinquent filers program for the GST, and it's been running. We use a risk-based system and we actually collect a fair amount of money once we identify a delinquent filer and catch them, but it is risk-based.

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, I'll just respond to that. I think, as I said in my earlier response, there's cost, and one could do a cost-benefit analysis, but there's also the element of time, so we have to.... If we go back to that moment in time, we were building a brand new system. This wasn't running off of our existing CRA system; we built a new system.

Public Accounts committee  Definitely this was an extraordinary time to be undertaking this new program and sorting out all these trade-offs that we had. I think it's important to know that we have experience here, so some of the upfront verifications that we did were quite effective. We operate on risk basis.

Public Accounts committee  I don't have a figure on that. I mean, directionally, I can say that we are better off if we catch something at the front end. That's a more efficient process for us, but it also does entail some costs, and in this circumstance of delivering this program, it wasn't just about costs.

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, there are two questions there. I think the first one is whether we are re-evaluating and thinking of using the SIN numbers. We are not contemplating that. We got the program launched the way it was. We feel that we have enough back-end comfort that we don't need to re-evaluate that decision at this time.

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, I would note two points on that. One is that if we're talking about GST/HST filings, there will be a certain percentage of those entities that wouldn't have to have filed by then. In other words, they're on an annual basis. Some registrants file monthly; some file quarterly, and some file annually, so there would be a percentage of that number.

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, I'll take an initial run at that. I don't have the cost estimate in front of me. It is fair to say that as we delivered the program, as I said earlier, there was a balance between how we could get the money out more quickly versus getting as much information as we possibly could for that initial verification.

Public Accounts committee  Let me just finish the response I had, which is to emphasize again that just because we don't collect information up front doesn't mean we can never go back and find out whether something inappropriate happened. We have that back end. I wanted to make that point. I'll give my colleagues an opportunity if they have information they'd like to provide on the spot, but otherwise we'd be happy to provide you with what we can in writing after this.

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, I'd say two things in response. We will obviously be doing a pretty thorough “lessons learned” exercise out of this. If we went back, could we have done something different? Would it be helpful in the future, as I said, both for any future pandemic but also in a normal auditing process?

Public Accounts committee  I'd like to add a few comments. Then I'll ask my colleague Mr. Gallivan to do the same. It's important to note that we used the information we got as the program was being implemented to improve verification as much as possible. It was actually impossible to halt all the applications because that would have made the program inefficient.

Public Accounts committee  I'll take the specific question of the social insurance numbers and maybe put it into context. At the beginning of this program, we definitely had a balancing act to get the benefits out as quickly as possible while doing as much upfront verification as we could. At the end of the day, we knew that we would have back-end audits and/or verifications to rely on if we were to miss something in the first effort.

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, I apologize for having joined the call late. I was able to get in a few minutes after it started, but I did have another meeting that I had to finish up. I would turn to one of my colleagues to talk about the specifics of whether that number of resources is more or less than in previous years.

Public Accounts committee  At the most global level, we have to look at the resources we have at our disposal at the agency and try to put them towards the most effective places. We don't have unlimited resources to do everything. We have to take, as I said, a risk-based approach to figure out whether we have the right number of resources on that particular program.