Public Accounts committee  Yes. I guess we may need to go back and forth about exactly which companies you're talking about at risk of going insolvent—

Public Accounts committee  Yes. Maybe all I would say is that how one judges whether a company is about to go insolvent is a judgment call in terms of where you sit. I don't have that number here with me. We can go back and see if we can construct, but again, I think it's going to be loose. How do you de

Public Accounts committee  I'll ask one of my colleagues to elaborate a bit on what I'm going to say. I would just mention that on the prepayment side—this is the wage subsidy we're talking about, which I would distinguish from the CERB—we had people who are very familiar with corporate tax filings, the c

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. While I can't comment on the specific case you've raised, what I would say is that if we look at that case, we would have to see what the legislation passed by Parliament says. Does it restrict that kind of thing or does it not? Our role as administrator is

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, yes, we would. We've been pretty transparent thus far with our progress reports—early days—but I think we would continue that pattern of reporting back on this area, for now but also, frankly, for the future, because if this or something similar ever happened again, i

Public Accounts committee  I don't think there's a lack of rigour. The program is very rigorous in terms of the wage subsidy. As Ms. Hawara said, it's a process that focuses on high-risk applications, but it's not a lack of rigour. There has been a lot of rigour. For some programs, such as the emergency w

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, as I've indicated, we feel comfortable with the compliance program and that we will be able to deliver to Canadians an effective compliance program that, using a risk-based method, will get the money back from people who didn't deserve it. I would say that ranges from,

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I don't recall our doing that with the wage subsidy, I'd have to say, because, again, we felt relatively comfortable, given the circumstances, that we had some prepayment checks that were kicking out a lot of claims before we made the payments. We felt we had a pretty

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I would say there's a lot of space between being comfortable in thinking you have a good plan and not caring or not worrying about it. We care. We worry about this. At the CRA, we have responsibility for delivering benefits, as well as a big responsibility for enforcin

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, at the beginning we thought about whether we could use social insurance numbers. There were a few problems with that and reasons we didn't. It would have taken a lot longer to do the systems development that we would have needed to do to incorporate those. It would hav

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, we certainly take account of what we observe and factor that in. Where is the risk? Will a company present, potentially, a particularly high risk? I want to make sure we don't confuse administrative issues with policy issues, because you can get both in here. People m

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Chair. We remember that. Actually, as part of the wage subsidy, we started the audits quite early, with a pilot project in 2020, and there was some push-back on that. We carried on with it because we thought that even though it was early, it would give us some informa

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, the decision to carry on with the plan we have—

Public Accounts committee  I would say it's largely the CRA's decision. I suppose somebody else within government could have a different view and tell us not to do anything, but I think in this domain, it is largely we who decide.

Public Accounts committee  I maybe would ask my colleagues to expand on it, but we have filed a progress report with the committee. We're examining, as we go, what we see and what it tells us—through our business intelligence and other models—about where we need to look next and where we need to look after