Canada’s auditor general has concluded the public service was by-and-large successful in rolling out emergency income supports under difficult circumstances and on a painfully tight timeline at the onset of the pandemic.
In a pair of audit reports on the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), Auditor General of Canada Karen Hogan said the Department of Finance and the Canada Revenue Agency worked swiftly with the information at hand to implement the policies, which were aimed at supporting taxpayers and businesses staring down an unprecedented pandemic.
In prepared remarks, Hogan said that while the public service showed admirable flexibility and speed in implementing the supports, the rapid spread of COVID-19 did expose some pre-existing weaknesses in terms of Canada’s preparedness for a calamity of this magnitude.
“We observed nimbleness during our audits of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, and pandemic preparedness, surveillance and border control measures,” she said. “While we found that the government was not ready for a pandemic of this magnitude, the public service adjusted to prioritize the needs of Canadians during the emergency situation, and it has sustained those efforts for more than a year.”
The CERB and CEWS programs remain some of the most expensive subsidies ever undertaken by the federal government, with the latest estimates from the federal government pegging the total cost of the two programs at $171.6 billion.
Though Hogan praised the speed and nimbleness displayed by public servants in ensuring cash made it out the door quickly, she did acknowledge the pace at which the programs were needed meant that in the early days of the pandemic the public service relied heavily on Canadians to self-report their eligibility and exposed flaws in Canada’s pre-pandemic data-collection efforts.
“To prioritize issuing payments, the Canada Revenue Agency chose to forgo certain controls that it could have used to validate the reasonableness of subsidy applications,” Hogan said. “The design and rollout of the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy highlighted pre-existing weaknesses in the agency’s systems, approaches and data that will need to be addressed to improve the robustness of Canada’s tax system.”
While the emergency programs were implemented in record-breaking time, the auditor general said the pandemic response should inform a framework for future emergency response and recovery programs. She also recommended Canada improve its data-collection regime, conduct verifications on those who received benefits and publish an economic evaluation of the wage subsidy programs.
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