Public Accounts committee  To answer your question, I should point out that we processed more than 300,000 applications manually and identified 6,000 that were problematic. Conversely, we identified 1,500 cases where the business was entitled to receive a lot more. In the end, we verified 40% of the amount

Public Accounts committee  If I may, Madam Chair, I can answer that. Yes, we will. The first phase is to examine the value of the application against the number of employees and the wage paid, but we did not conduct any detailed audits based on revenue. We have been performing follow-up audits since Augus

Public Accounts committee  I'll talk about the administrative side first. We did a manual audit of all applications from businesses that had a history of fraud or criminality and did a thorough review. With respect to eligibility criteria, the nature of some businesses, their history or the fact that the

Public Accounts committee  We basically learned about likely mistakes or discrepancies from our initial audits and fed that into our file selection algorithms. Once we sampled a few people who made a mistake, we were looking for everybody else who might have made the same mistake.

Public Accounts committee  I would say our colleagues were developing that estimate for a purpose, which was dialing in the level of risk and the level of effort that would be required. It would be speculation on my part, but I would speculate that they would have stratified to at least a T1 population and

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, perhaps I can try to answer the member's question. The coverage level is something we worry about at the CRA. If you look at our annual report to Parliament and do the calculation, you see that our coverage level for small- and medium-sized businesses is quite low,

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. The question has been asked. I want to point out that I will be talking about risk categories. Since then, the $20 billion has still not been repaid. The money is taxable, so it comes down to the math. There are various categories. As I mentioned, a num

Public Accounts committee  Yes, absolutely. We have a variety of payment arrangement options, as indicated in the document you referred to. We work with taxpayers so they can spread the payments out over a number of years. It can take four, five or six years to clear the debt owed to the government.

Public Accounts committee  At this point, it would be speculation if I were to answer, but we can look to other debts to get an idea: $1 billion in business debt, $1 billion in personal income tax debt and $1 billion in GST/HST debt. Then we can determine whether recovery is worthwhile. The opportunity co

Public Accounts committee  Maybe I'll start quickly.

Public Accounts committee  The most common scenario—you have to put your mind back to the pandemic period—would have been employees who were laid off before the wage subsidy program was announced. Then, when the wage subsidy program was announced, they were brought back retroactively. That was a deliberate

Public Accounts committee  That's correct.

Public Accounts committee  Given the sheer volume of applications, an unprecedented number, the agency had to set up an emergency program to support the existing program, which could not handle the volume.

Public Accounts committee  The answer is no, Madam Chair. The numbers went up. They were already higher than we would have liked. The reason is that we extended the deadline for filing returns because of the pandemic. Coming back to your first question, I want to point out that we also used payroll deduct

Public Accounts committee  I'm reluctant to answer because it covers a number of categories. Yes, we have an idea of the marginal cost of program administration, legitimate errors and aggressive planning. A single figure covers a variety of errors or discrepancies. That makes it difficult to break down t