Public Accounts committee  If I understand your question correctly—and one of my colleagues may help—

Public Accounts committee  Think of the tax season that comes up, which will be starting shortly. As you say, the end of April is the end of it. Even in a normal year, we wouldn't have a lot of people's tax information for 2019 until after April 30 because people tend to back-end—

Public Accounts committee  I don't know the precise date.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. The first thing I would say is that I'm confident that, at the end of the day, people will find our compliance efforts to be rigorous in this space with regard to the COVID benefits. We're taking the risk-based approach. We're taking the time to do it, and we're finding the places where we need to look.

Public Accounts committee  That definitely would be a factor as well, but I think it's important to recognize that in the prepayment world we were learning and we were getting better. I think that's part of our message on the postpayment compliance. We have our risk-based approach. We have our algorithms.

Public Accounts committee  I might just ask if one of my colleagues wants to go into detail, but I think it's basically all of the above.

Public Accounts committee  What it reflects is something that we mentioned earlier, which was us improving our prepayment controls as we went along, because with these programs one didn't know at the time how long they were going to last or what subsequent programs would be there. As they stayed on for a while, we developed additional tools to be able to have better prepayment control.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. Just before I answer that, I'll just tag this on to what Jean-François said. There were a lot of lessons to be learned. Everything wasn't perfect. We actually produced a paper that we gave to the committee and I think ESDC did as well. It's important to learn those lessons.

Public Accounts committee  Backing up for one second, at the CRA, we treat public servants as general taxpayers. If you violate the rules, you suffer the compliance efforts. I don't have numbers right in front of me. There were not very many, obviously. I don't believe any of those cases have gone to a criminal investigation.

Public Accounts committee  I will take that back and endeavour to get you those numbers.

Public Accounts committee  Those are the kinds of initiatives that will help us.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the question. I don't have that figure that you requested right in front of me. I should say that, when we do our tax gap analysis, it's always a few years behind, because it takes a while to get all the data assembled for that, but I would say that we've made quite a bit of progress.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. It certainly depends on the type of extra prepayment step you put in. Some are more severe than others. There was no doubt that the more we put friction in the system or asked for extra checks, it was going to delay things. It would often be a manual exercise that we would have to do within the CRA.

Public Accounts committee  I was just talking about the fraud circumstance where we had to block some activity or force people to call us. It meant that people couldn't get their payment for three or four days. Instead of getting it in three or four days, they would get it in eight to 10 days, or maybe not at all.

Public Accounts committee  I'm sorry. I just didn't catch the last part.