Public Accounts committee  Work is continuing in terms of the cases that were identified back in 2012. Many cases have been abandoned, dropped, or withdrawn.

Public Accounts committee  In some cases, the conclusions were such that there were no further issues, so investigations were dropped. With regard to the cases that involve a problem address, fraud is not necessarily being perpetrated. One of the issues in our programming is that when we have newcomers w

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, as I was indicating in response to the previous question, it is often the case that when newcomers, particularly refugees, come to Canada, we work through settlement organizations. They have temporary temporary housing or apartments for newcomers until such time as the

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, the budget for the citizenship program on in 2015-16 was $62 million.

Public Accounts committee  I'd have to go back and verify that and provide it to the committee and to the chair after this meeting.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, my colleague has just provided the information that in 2013 the budget for the citizenship program was $50 million.

Public Accounts committee  As I indicated in my opening remarks, we take the Auditor General's report very seriously. An action plan had been put in place by the department back in 2012, in the absence of what previously had been in place in terms of a risk framework and in an attempt to put in better frau

Public Accounts committee  With regard to the program integrity framework that I just mentioned, we did have one in place, but clearly it needed to be improved and strengthened.

Public Accounts committee  We've taken on board the recommendations of the Auditor General in that regard. Moving forward, that's in fact what we intend to do—to have regular quality control and quality assurance exercises, to see if our risk indicators are appropriate, and to see if in fact we need to mod

Public Accounts committee  Good day, Mr. Chair. I am pleased to appear before the committee to discuss the Spring 2016 Reports of the Auditor General of Canada. As you've indicated, I'm here with several colleagues. From my Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, I have Mr. Robert Orr, assis

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If I may, Mr. Chair, I've just been told that we had been prepared to respond verbally. We do have written answers. We're having them translated right now, so we would like to give them to you in a bilingual version, if we can, by the end of the day today, as soon as we have them

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, if I could just make one point in terms of the role of the visa officer, it is a balance, and the visa officer does have to fulfill the responsibilities and obligations of the legislation. The legislation is very specific in terms of the admissibility criteria. It is

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If I may just add, Mr. Chair, we have actually done a lot of outreach in terms of trying to locate the various individuals who had made applications, both by email and general call-outs. What the CFO is stating is that in the early days we had many who came forward. Now, despite

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, as I may have indicated in a previous response, included in the asylum system changes back to 2012 was funding for a pilot called reviews and interventions. It was a pilot that would provide for the ability of officers of the department to intervene in proceedings befo

Citizenship and Immigration committee  At this point, work is continuing by officials in assessing the overall outcomes and results of the changes to the asylum system. It was a very large, comprehensive transformational change that took place. It had implications certainly not just for our department, but of course a