Human Resources committee  I'll ask Mr. Kremers to comment on this. My guess would be it's unusual, except in the case of all the SINs we're now providing to children, who may receive them at five years of age. Parents buy the education grant for some time, discontinue it; five, six years pass, and they become dormant.

Human Resources committee  Mr. Chair, I gather I wasn't clear in my previous answer. There were two reasons. One was the difference in reporting. The Auditor General would be reporting in February. Pricewaterhouse had results for us in August of last year. That gave us a six-month headstart on dealing with significant issues we had to work on.

Human Resources committee  Mr. Chair, a small digression. I mentioned earlier that we have not set goals, that we need to set goals, and that we're working on setting goals. But the department chose, over the past four years, to fix the process by which SINs were issued to make sure all future SINs after 2002 had it; we were sure of their integrity.

Human Resources committee  Key fields of the social insurance register--identify them and decide how accurate they need to be.

Human Resources committee  Yes, Mr. Chair, we've been looking into this, prompted by the Auditor General, and there are two studies that have come to our attention. The first was done roughly a year ago by the OECD, and it estimated that the number of Canadians living outside Canada--Canadians born in Canada who are living outside Canada in an OECD country--was roughly 1.5 million people, but that is only in OECD countries.

Human Resources committee  Beginning with your second question, we do look at SIN-related fraud. An awful lot of it tends to be related to employment insurance. It's individuals who are on claim and are able to obtain, one way or another, an alternative identity through a social insurance number. And then they're able to work while on claim as someone else, either a fictitious identity or they borrowed someone else's.

Human Resources committee  Well, we've reported, I'd go so far as to say inconsistently, since 2002 in various reports to Parliament—the RPP and the DPR—about things like reaching vital events agreements and the various activities we'd undertaken, but the Auditor General is pushing us to become more results based.

Human Resources committee  The Auditor General, in all the reports done by her office on the social insurance number, has done a comparison, as I mentioned in my opening statement, of the population resident in Canada over a certain age and the number of SINs that are held. As I pointed out, not surprisingly there are more SIN holders than there are Canadian citizens in the country, because an awful lot of Canadians, we've discovered, and studies tell us, are expatriate and living abroad.

Human Resources committee  Mr. Chair, that's one of the questions that we are currently working on. We're looking at those programs that use the SIN for administrative purposes and want to see to what extent their current clientele of recipients have dormant flags associated with the SIR and the SIN. Our expectation is that will be extremely low.

Human Resources committee  The nature of a dormant file means it hasn't had any activity at all in government programs in the past five years. We know they're not being used. Some additional files may go dormant in the future, but they're not showing up in CRA and they're not showing up in EI. They're not making contributions and they're not receiving CPP.

Human Resources committee  It's precisely what would happen if I left the country for more than five years, I came back, and I applied for some kind of federal benefit. There would be a dormant flag on my file because I didn't file with CRA or have any contact with Canada at all in that time. When I came back, I'd have to prove that I was me.

Human Resources committee  Mr. Chair, we commissioned the work by Pricewaterhouse because the nature of SIN management in the SIR is one of continuous improvement. Knowing that the Auditor General had planned a follow-up audit, knowing it would be reported in February 2007, and knowing as well that we've been working very hard on improving the SIN, we wanted to know if there were things we could do before the Auditor General reported, to continue to make progress in the areas identified in 2002, and then fold in the recommendations of the Auditor General with the ongoing work that we'd already started from Pricewaterhouse.

Human Resources committee  You don't want me to respond?

Human Resources committee  Mr. Chair, let me begin by saying that the passport is not currently one of the documents we use for the purposes of issuing SINs. What we decided several years ago is to go back to foundation documents. You'll recall that in 2002, when the Auditor General looked at the SIN program, she found that there were several dozen different kinds of documents that could be used in the SIN issuance process as proof of identity, including photocopies of those documents that were notarized.

Human Resources committee  Onno, would you like to answer that?