Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I will answer the question first. I will then ask my colleagues to add their comments. The main reason we can't estimate the amount paid to ineligible recipients is that we're not far enough into the audit process. We're still analyzing taxpayer files and developing o

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. If you look at the businesses that benefited from the wage subsidy, you see a very broad cross-section of size of businesses in the economy. I think the Auditor General, if I recall correctly in the report, has a table that shows the numbers by size of bus

Public Accounts committee  Yes. If your time is short, so is mine, so let me just try to give you a very quick answer.

Public Accounts committee  Okay. That's perfect. Yes, sometimes we don't talk about that as much. There were prepayment controls, particularly on the wage subsidy, where we took a look. I think we examined 100% of the applications automatically, and then put some aside. We said we were going to take a clo

Public Accounts committee  No. I wouldn't characterize it as not having enough resources. Certainly, it would take more resources to go after every single dollar—

Public Accounts committee  No. We think that is an overestimate. Again, I would acknowledge that we're early in the compliance program, so we don't know for sure where it's going to go. However, based on our evidence to date, we see businesses generally complying. Where they have made mistakes, they've be

Public Accounts committee  I'm not sure it's a fair description of how we're approaching it. Let me say that I think when you refer to the $15.5 billion and using GST/HST.... To be fair to the Auditor General's team, they were trying to come up with an estimate of how much might be out there, when there wa

Public Accounts committee  We haven't actually estimated the $15.5 billion. What we have we have on the ground. We've started audits and we've completed audits. We can see what we've done so far in some of the higher-risk cases that we've identified, and we don't think if you extrapolate that—

Public Accounts committee  It's hard to say at this stage. Even with the $15.5 billion, I think the Auditor General would agree that's not a—

Public Accounts committee  I can tell you that about 6% of complaints that we have had so far have been either adjusted or denied.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, we're very confident of that. It is true that there are some restrictions after three or four years, but those don't apply in cases where we see fraud or misleading information. It terms of collections, once we establish the debt, we have lots of time to collect. It's conce

Public Accounts committee  I'm actually not 100% sure what you're referring to when you say—

Public Accounts committee  I would have to turn to my colleague, but if we wanted to, I would expect we could. As I said, if there are issues of fraud or other misappropriate information, then we can extend the time deadline. We'll face that three-year or four-year clock for the majority of the cases—

Public Accounts committee  I'll tackle that as two aspects, and I'll pull them apart a bit. One is whether we should be going after all the places where there could be risk or whether we take a more risk-based approach. I think that's the question you're asking. The other is a specific methodology to proj

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. We're pleased to be here today to discuss the Auditor General of Canada's “Report 10—Specific COVID-19 Benefits”, with a focus today on the Canada emergency wage subsidy, or CEWS, as we may refer to it. You've already introduced the three assistant commiss