20-12-21, 13:43
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FEDERAL Govt Deposited $26M in WRONG Bank Acts Last Year
FEDERAL Government Deposited Nearly $26M in The WRONG Bank Accounts Last Year
The federal government deposited nearly $26 million into the wrong bank accounts during the last fiscal year — and more than $10 million of it may be gone for good.
CBC News 20 DEC 2021.
Conservative Treasury Board critic Kelly McCauley said government payments that end up in the wrong bank accounts can cause real problems for the intended recipients. (CBC News)
According to figures tabled in the House of Commons, the government sent 22,170 direct deposits to the wrong bank accounts between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021.
In the previous fiscal year, it deposited 9,619 payments worth a total of $6.6 million into the wrong accounts.
The number of cases reported during the 2020-2021 fiscal year is the highest since at least 2012. The total amount paid into the wrong accounts — $25.9 million — is much higher than the figure reported for the previous year and is the second largest annual amount of misdirected cash reported since at least 2009.
While the government was able to recover $7.1 million in misdirected payments last year, another mislaid $10.2 million is listed in government documents as "not expected to be recovered." The government says it hopes to chase down and recover another $8.6 million in coming years.
The largest single payment misdirected last year — for $3.5 million — was recovered by the federal government.
Conservative Treasury Board critic Kelly McCauley said his office has received a lot of calls from constituents whose benefit payments never arrived and who couldn't get through to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), which oversees many pandemic benefit programs.
"The difficulty was trying to get through to CRA for months and months," said McCauley, MP for Edmonton West.
The government says the spike in the number of payments going astray is due to the large rise in the number of payments going to individual Canadians because of the pandemic.
"There was a significant increase in payments issued from April 1, 2020 up to March 31, 2021 to individuals and businesses as a result of the actions taken by the government to support hardship created by the COVID-19 pandemic," wrote Stéphanie Hamel, spokesperson for Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC).
The department includes the Receiver General's office, which oversees government payments.
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