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Upon looking further into it - it’s a total 10b of all Covid Related Benefits, (my bad as it is actually stated as such in the title of the Article), CERB is 5.4, CRB is 3.2, CRCB is 1.52 and the remaining benefits are all less than 1bil - Concluding with a total of 10.35bil the CRA claims was overpaid
Well even if it is difficult to get back, those were not just relief payments, they were stimulus payments too. So even if ineligible people got them by fraud, by accident, or by misunderstanding -most of it went right back into the economy.
So if someone on social assistance bought an ATV, at least the local “Toys For Big Boys” was able to employ a salesperson a little longer.
If I remember correctly, the budget for this program included a percentage of funds that were expected to go out to ineligible people because the benefits of getting it out fast out weighed the cost of expected mistakes.
Bottom line is, regardless of your situation, if you took money from Canadian taxpayers that you were not eligible for, you should be forced to pay it back. I hope the CRA fights for every penny.
Hope people remember that due to a software glitch at the very beginning it was possible to apply multiple times and get paid each time. It was a good time to get some "free" money that helped some people to buy cars and make a deposit for an apartment or send it abroad. But nothing is ever free in this world and eventually the CRA would have come after them and get it all back.
More than $80 billion was paid out in CERB. If $10 billion is owed back (and $4 billion has already been clawed back). That means that $14 billion of the $81 billion was paid to people ineligible.
Blair Mantin, a licensed insolvency trustee in Vancouver, says he sees clients every week trying to resolve their pandemic repayments. Mantin said the CRA's approach was initially lenient but "in the last few months, I've seen that approach change pretty significantly."
I didn't have high hopes for the Carney governments but I wasn't expecting "Carney is so angry that the Trudeau Liberals made life a little better for poor people during Covid that he's sending the CRA on a revenge tour about it", haha.
I'd be 100% fine with the CRA going after not only businesses that took the money fraudulently or used it for bonus', but also individuals.
CERB was on one end an amazing thing that the government did in pretty quick order, on the other hand they wasted tons of money by allowing weak rules on who would be eligible. It didn't seem complex, if you lost your job around COVID whether due to COVID or not you should be able to get CERB. They also kept it going for far too long as businesses all started going back to normal while CERB payments kept being dolled out encouraging people to take a CERB summer.
Allowing students to claim CERB even those who were not Canadians... and also to allow people who worked the previous year to claim CERB? That was a bit of bullshit.
I literally wasn't allowed to work at my place of work.... (restaurant) so I couldn't earn anything while we were stuck in limbo.
What’s wrong with businesses using the business assistance programs for bonuses?
The workers we were able to keep on were still working with the public, wearing masks all day, risking their health to provide customers with items they needed to keep their sanity in lockdown… why they heck shouldn’t we have paid them hazard bonuses? In my mind, that’s the best way we used any extra money we received. Very strange stance to take…
Notice how they're more eager to go after individuals, not companies? I got laid off after my employer, a casino, took that money. CRA never went after the multi million dollar business. Chickenshits...
Hey remember when people were criticizing the rollout of these programs back in the day saying the rules were too lax and people were bound to abuse them… and they were all shouted down…. Yeah crazy.
His always happens. The government sloppily rolls something out to score PR points, then it comes out later that it was flawed all along and we have to pick up the tab.
They also made the CERB available to unemployed people on welfare. Several of my bum extended family members all happily collected $8000 each. Still sitting on welfare 5 years later. The government will never recoup that from people who refuse to work. It would also cost more to incarcerate them for not repaying.
They should have, at the very least, cross referenced the list of people applying for the benefit with the list of people on welfare - whose income was not impacted by the lockdowns.
Even then, people ineligible under the standards they had in place applied for "free money" without any care that they'd have to pay it back if they were found to be ineligible. My wife was encouraged to apply by a grocery store clerk who applied despite being employed.
Hindsight is 20/20, but it always seemed that the plan was going to be clawing back payments that were sent to ineligible applicants.
Well, many people who qualified for the CERB were typically employed. That was the point. It was an emergency relief benefit for employed people who were experiencing reduced hours, or reduced childcare options, reduced transportation options, etc. It wasn't exclusively for people who suddenly found themselves entirely out of work.
My sister worked at a Staples copy centre, and still lived with our parents, yet she qualified for the CERB for having her hours reduced, even though she was still going to work and didn't have many living expenses.
I'm don't doubt that many still clamored for the "free money' without being eligible, but the government reasoning was that it was too time consuming to look up each person's eligibility when so many Canadians were in dire need of help, fast.
My point is that people on welfare already exist in a database, so a simple automated scan of the applicants names and SINS to produce a binary yes/no output of whether they were already on welfare wouldn't have required the complexity of a CRA rep analyzing individual criteria. This was a huge oversight on their part.
I started a business in 2018. I wasn't eligible for anything because I hadn't been in business for more than 3 years. Luckily my business was considered 'essential' so I was able to survive. A lot of others had up close up shop. So I can't complain.
But I'm glad all the publicly traded companies were able to get all the benefits then turn around and slash the workforce!
It's worse than that. In some cases welfare and odsp case workers were ordering clients to apply for cerb knowing they were in eligible. The goal was to close the file temporarily. They didn't care that it would result in the client ending up in a pile of govt debt they could never repay
There is no clawing back for this demographic. I'm not suggesting that they do. They can't withhold welfare payments people need to live. It's a non-issue. All they do is write some sternly worded letters and threaten to garnish any future wages, which only discourages the recipients from seeking employment down the road.
Considering welfare in this country is laughably less than $20,000/yr, a pitance that is incapable of preventing hardship on even the staunchest of tight wads... CERB was a catastrophe from the beginning that only fueled the worsening income divide.
If you already could barely live, and then you see all the middle class jackasses around you who didn't need the money get free money, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see it was a bad program from the beginning. Everyone should have been eligible for the program, regardless of working part time for a month before the pandemic started.
Every time I hear about how great CERB was, I usually know it is coming from someone who took it from a position of comfort themselves.
Interesting thought though - The CRA can go directly to a business and have that business shave a certain percentage off of their pay to go directly to the CRA for unpaid taxes.
So in this case, since welfare is provincial, what if the CRA went to the provinces and asked them to shave off up to 30% of an individual’s well fare cheque until they pay off what they took? That way the recipient has no choice. The money is taken from you before you receive, and you then will need to face the consequences of your actions.
I was curious so I looked up welfare rates for each province, and most welfare recipients are living on around $700 max per month, which is already not even close to enough to live on. Disability recipients only receive a few hundred dollars more. "Shaving off 30%" from this would kill a lot of people whose only crime was being poor and desperate.
I'm sorry, but "What if we starved and evicted people on assistance en masse for the crime of applying for a federal emergency benefit b/c provincial governments didn't give them enough to survive" is an insanely cruel idea.
You’re inventing a narrative about starving and evicting people to avoid addressing the lack of fiscal accountability. The federal gov isn’t an emergency ATM for provincial failures. If you think provincial welfare rates are too low, take it up with your MLA. You don't get to fix provincial policy by taking federal taxpayer funds…
Why should a middle class worker be forced to repay every cent of an ineligible benefit through wage garnishment while you argue that others should get a free pass just because their income comes from a different government pool? You’re advocating for inequity…. Think of it this way. If a charity gives you a free loaf of bread because you’re hungry, and you decide to take the cash from the register on your way out because the bread isn't enough for you, you’ve committed a crime. You should have to give back that money.
This is how the law is written and you’re arguing that following the law is an attack on the poor. The real attack is telling law abiding working citizens that their tax dollars are fair game for anyone who feels they aren't getting enough from their province…
what if the CRA went to the provinces and asked them to shave off up to 30% of an individual’s well fare cheque until they pay off what they took?
The province tells them to pound sand. I'm not aware of any provincial welfare program that allows cheques to be garnished for anything but back child support. (Not that the CRA would do this anyway, since they can just seize your tax refunds until they're whole.)
The CRA has no ability to do what I mentioned. That’s why I started with “an interesting thought”.
Reality is, those who already live off the backs of working class people (those on welfare) will get away with this if they applied for CERB. Although they are not eligible, they would have received the money and now have virtually no way of paying it back. The CRA can hold back GST cheques etc but that will take a lifetime to get the money back from the poor.
It would have been nice to at least have a vetting process where the CRA would have declined those who are already on assistance programs. But that was never done. And now we are here.
Yes, it would be offensive, but I didn't imply that everyone on welfare is a bum, because that's untrue. It was clear that I was specifically referring to my bum family members. They had a hotel party each month and blew the entire CERB on booze, blow, smokes, and god knows what else. By their own admission. Take your moral outrage somewhere else.
Makes for sensationalist headlines, but the fact is, the program was easily accessible to people who it probably shouldn't have been accessible to, and there's little to no chance it will ever be directly recovered from individuals.
Where most of it will be recovered from, is from garnishing HST rebates and tax refunds. It might take 10-20 years, but eventually those amounts will be zeroed off.
The covid related benefits have no interest applied to them. To the people who received them in error, it was basically an interest free non-repayable loan, that got many people through an otherwise very difficult time in history.
Where most of it will be recovered from, is from garnishing HST rebates and tax refunds. It might take 10-20 years, but eventually those amounts will be zeroed off.
This is an interesting idea. Has the CRA documented this approach before, or something you’ve identified as a possible tool for non-repayment?
They should have prevented money from being sent to non Canadian addresses as a start. I remember a bunch of people from other countries getting cheques. Like that was a terrible oversight. Something like 2-4 billion went over seas. Never see a dollar of that again.
CRA fucked it up and they know it, and have no legal grounds to collect money from some of the people they claim weren't entitled to the benefit. The REALLY important thing they failed to do was to distinguish between NET income and GROSS income on the application eligibility criteria which essentially blurred the lines for many working class Canadians who needed that money to stay afloat, and who thought they were allowed to take this money.
The government at the time really just wanted to keep the economy going so they injected this cash quickly, without much thought of the mistakes they were making along the way. Sure there were bad actors that took advantage of this, but there were also good honest people that are now being targeted because of CRA's lack of clarity on eligibility requirements.
If only the CRA was so keen on recovering funds from the wealthy Canadians KPMG helped stash away over 200 billion in tax money, instead of going after working class Canadians who had nothing to fall back on, we'd be in a better position.
With the CRA its always go after the little guy, and let the big fish continue to steal. Want to read more? 10 billion from ordinary Canadians (for the most part) or 200 billion from the wealthy scammers? hmmm
I am one of the little fish the CRA decided to come after for this net vs gross thing. I am a self employed music teacher. I barely survived covid. I would argue that almost no one can pay their bills on $1000 gross income (or even net!) also, which was the threshold. And there was no where cheaper to move. Gross income, I was eligible, with my deductions.
Then I got a letter that I owed everything- every single payment back - even the CSRB when I was almost on my deathbed with COVID, unable to work.
Had to file a consumer proposal basically just for the CRA debt. I had no credit cards or anything else. Just got absolutely raked by the CrA. Still looking for other employment but it’s next to impossible out there.
Thanks Canadian government. I would rage quit the industry and this country if I could.
Your point is well taken on the net vs gross issue, but how many people in this country have an income between $5K gross and $5K net? It can’t be that many, given that $5K net is not nearly enough to live on to begin with, so who are these people on this specific income bracket? Are we talking about teenagers or retirees here?
Great question and distinction. I would say that anyone on disability assistance would have been caught in this trap, and these are the people that needed it most.
Tbh I’d be fine if the CRA forgives all payments made to gross vs net confusion mistakes and moves on, these aren’t the rich. It’s something they should’ve done 5 years ago when the net v gross issue came up.
Sadly the article is lacking any details on how many people and how much that would cover, and the end of it is a waste as soon as they get to the CTF guy portion. Media needs to stop asking those partisan hypocrites their opinion.
CRA fucked it up and they know it, and have no legal grounds to collect money from some of the people they claim weren't entitled to the benefit. The REALLY important thing they failed to do was to distinguish between NET income and GROSS income on the application eligibility criteria
Bullshit. The law is what got passed by Parliament, not what the CRA puts on forms. There's a reasonable argument that people who were accidentally misled should not have to pay any penalties or interest... but the CRA isn't charging any penalties or interest anyway.
Legal arguments could include that that the gov had already established specific requirements when offering the money and that changing the criteria afterwards unfairly put many Canadians in a precarious financial trap. Many people would not have taken this money had they known they had to give it back. I can't think of any financial agreement someone signed where the lender was allowed to move the goalposts after the fact and were allowed to collect.
As for you qualm about my source of the article; I asked ChatGPT for a link, not to write an article. You can verify this by removing every part of the link after the ? (that's just the source of the link).
Legal arguments could include that that the gov had already established specific requirements when offering the money and that changing the criteria afterwards
The criteria were set out in the legislation and were never changed.
Some people were confused about the difference between "gross revenue" and "income", but their confusion in no way alters the clear language of the legislation passed by Parliament.
The CRA applied what the government told them to do and the point was to get the money in the hands of Canadians as fast as possible.
And the government was basically stuck between 2 bad ideas. Either you forgoe the usual pre-payment assessment, which means money gets to Canadians when needed, but it means that you will likely lose money to ineligible recipients or you process each application the normal government way but that means it would have taken months to send it to recipients who needed it immediately.
And it is odd that even back then, the media cried rivers about cerb sent to individuals while not saying much about the much larger amounts sent to employers (cews for example) with as little oversight.
Makes for a dramatic headline. But they knew the economy was about to collapse. Pushing money to keep millions of Canadians at home, with heat and food, was the point. It wasn’t a perfect system but it was quick and solved more problems than it created.
"We chose to spend $10B on economic stimulus" would be different than "It took us 5 years to figure out that we lost $10B to people who were never supposed to get it".
CERB needed to happen VERY fast in order to serve its purpose, and on balance it achieved its goal, but a perfect, no-mistakes implementation would have taken a year or more.
As others in this thread correctly said, they at LEAST could have taken a couple extra days to double-check against obvious things like "has this person been on welfare for the past three years, and has NOT suddenly lost their income?"
double-check against obvious things like "has this person been on welfare for the past three years, and has NOT suddenly lost their income?"
Many (probably most?) systems in all levels of government don't talk to each other. It would have taken a while to communicate between the different departments for each individual, and even longer to develop a system to do so automatically.
One in every seven dollars was sent out to people who did not qualify. That seems still seems excessively poor, the headline massages the scope if anything. To this day I'm surprised CEBA loans weren't a wasteful scandal on their own, that was a free $20,000 for so many businesses.
It was a free $60,000 if your business was incorporated and didn't make it. Still sucks for the business, but there's virtually no recourse because there were no personal guarantees attached to the money.
One in every seven dollars was sent out to people who did not qualify. That seems still seems excessively poor
That honestly is not as bad as I thought it'd be.
That being said, it was an emergency. There was no time to create a system to vet eligible recipients; people needed to pay bills and rent now.
You can look at it with the benefit of hindsight and moan over the numbers or the severity of the pandemic, but even a 2 week delay would have been devastating to so many people.
UNRELATED EDIT: Don't report people in this subreddit, or you risk getting banned in retaliation by the mods. Second time I've been banned shortly after reporting someone. Absolutely absurd.
Agreed. It had great intentions. And some people took advantage of those great intentions when they were not who the program was for. And those people should pay up and be happy they don’t have to front the interest bill like a bank would make them.
It's not a binary, there is an in-between. We could have pushed money reasonably fast without enabling the magnitude of rampant fraud, just like we could have have more narrowly tailored eligibility to make reasonable checks and balances more practical without succumbing to any kind of extreme of letting the economy go belly up. Hindsight is 20/20 (no pun intended) but much of this was forseeable at the time and the government absolutely did knowingly make stupid decisions that deserve scrutiny so that we can learn from them going forward.
You have good points but I'm with the other commenter on this. We don't know how much longer CERB would have taken to roll out if they implemented a vetting process for applicants. My guess would be weeks, or even months of extra time considering all the disruptions going on.
Any such delay would have resulted in people unable to afford food, rent and utilities. Getting timely aid to eligible people in need is more important IMO than spending extra time setting up a vetting system.
We actually do know because the public sector prepared options for the government, it's just the government has exempted much of this from disclosure under freedom of information laws.
There are many reasonable "in-between options". What happened was the government opted to expand eligibility criteria too broadly beyond what could be reliably established through automated verification and then turned the CRA into a make work project trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube. That was a bad policy decision we should not repeat.
Exactly like the old adage... Some people would rather innocent people sometimes go to jail rather than a guilty person ever being free, some would rather a few guilty people go free if an innocent person never winds up in jail... I would rather everyone who needed the money got it and a few who didn't need it got it too, rather than people who really needed not getting it to prevent a few bad apples from getting anything. We can always take the time to hunt down the bad apples later.
Lots of people knowingly scammed the system for free money, and are now trying to claim ignorance, or that it should apply to them... they'll have to pay it back eventually.
Personally, I was laid off at the start of Covid, before CERB was announced, applied for EI, but got auto-shifted to CERB. The layoff only lasted a few weeks, and I tried to call to cancel CERB... but the phone lines were swamped those first few weeks ... eventually I was able to get it stopped, and at tax time I paid everything back.
The program was rolled out in a way, that when announced they even said, (paraphrasing) "that many people will get money they're not entitled to, and we'll sort it out later." ... it was better to do it this way, than to leave a deserving person without food, or shelter. They were clear about what the requirements were, and if people chose to apply while working, they were committing fraud... the fact the government is being nice and just asking for the money back is good. They could easily be charging them with fraud in the blatant cases, and/or charging interest.
I repaid my 2k back, cerb messed it all up. I figured I'd just wait until they asked for it back, and they did. I applied for ei right at the start of COVID, as my employer gave us all a temporary layoff. It was a known period under 60 days. Then I ended up with the 2k cerb or whatever in my account, and ei started.
I made sure to only apply for ei, not cerb, but it still happened.
TLDR: I'm sure some of it was honest mistake, but I'm sure a lot of it was intentional.
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So like about a quarter (10,000,000) of the CANADIAN population received $1000 each in benefits but really weren't eligible
Only 8.9 million people even applied for CERB and of that number, the CRA identified about 440,000 people who received funds in error.
…If that’s the case and those 440,000 took all 28 weeks of payment that’s only $6.1 Billion not 10… Hmmm🐟🐟🐟
Five years of interest on some of those 440k, though, plus additional benefits through 2021 and 2022.
There is no interest on COVID benefits
Upon looking further into it - it’s a total 10b of all Covid Related Benefits, (my bad as it is actually stated as such in the title of the Article), CERB is 5.4, CRB is 3.2, CRCB is 1.52 and the remaining benefits are all less than 1bil - Concluding with a total of 10.35bil the CRA claims was overpaid
Hope they come after every parasite that leeched of the system
People who used CERB money as a down payment for rental properties that ultimately led to RE train wreck
Well even if it is difficult to get back, those were not just relief payments, they were stimulus payments too. So even if ineligible people got them by fraud, by accident, or by misunderstanding -most of it went right back into the economy.
So if someone on social assistance bought an ATV, at least the local “Toys For Big Boys” was able to employ a salesperson a little longer.
If I remember correctly, the budget for this program included a percentage of funds that were expected to go out to ineligible people because the benefits of getting it out fast out weighed the cost of expected mistakes.
Bottom line is, regardless of your situation, if you took money from Canadian taxpayers that you were not eligible for, you should be forced to pay it back. I hope the CRA fights for every penny.
We're not seeing those 10B back
14b missing, approx. 4b already recouped. No, probably not the entire 10b, but hopefully a large percentage of it.
We are since they started seizing their pays
If you pay and file taxes in Canada, the CRA will get their due lol.
Hope people remember that due to a software glitch at the very beginning it was possible to apply multiple times and get paid each time. It was a good time to get some "free" money that helped some people to buy cars and make a deposit for an apartment or send it abroad. But nothing is ever free in this world and eventually the CRA would have come after them and get it all back.
More than $80 billion was paid out in CERB. If $10 billion is owed back (and $4 billion has already been clawed back). That means that $14 billion of the $81 billion was paid to people ineligible.
I didn't have high hopes for the Carney governments but I wasn't expecting "Carney is so angry that the Trudeau Liberals made life a little better for poor people during Covid that he's sending the CRA on a revenge tour about it", haha.
Are they going after the companies that took money under CEWS that they weren’t entitled to or is it just the CERB recipients?
You had to pre-qualify for CEWS. The rules were just moronic and handed money to profitable companies.
I'd be 100% fine with the CRA going after not only businesses that took the money fraudulently or used it for bonus', but also individuals.
CERB was on one end an amazing thing that the government did in pretty quick order, on the other hand they wasted tons of money by allowing weak rules on who would be eligible. It didn't seem complex, if you lost your job around COVID whether due to COVID or not you should be able to get CERB. They also kept it going for far too long as businesses all started going back to normal while CERB payments kept being dolled out encouraging people to take a CERB summer.
Allowing students to claim CERB even those who were not Canadians... and also to allow people who worked the previous year to claim CERB? That was a bit of bullshit.
I literally wasn't allowed to work at my place of work.... (restaurant) so I couldn't earn anything while we were stuck in limbo.
What’s wrong with businesses using the business assistance programs for bonuses?
The workers we were able to keep on were still working with the public, wearing masks all day, risking their health to provide customers with items they needed to keep their sanity in lockdown… why they heck shouldn’t we have paid them hazard bonuses? In my mind, that’s the best way we used any extra money we received. Very strange stance to take…
Kudos to your workplace giving out a bonus, but there was no federal program with that aim.
There was nothing stopping a profitable business from claiming assistance just to temporarily expand their profit margins.
So you don’t have a problem with the assistance programs being used for hazard bonuses then?
I'm not sure. It's at least better than subsidizing a temporary increase in profits.
Notice how they're more eager to go after individuals, not companies? I got laid off after my employer, a casino, took that money. CRA never went after the multi million dollar business. Chickenshits...
Hey remember when people were criticizing the rollout of these programs back in the day saying the rules were too lax and people were bound to abuse them… and they were all shouted down…. Yeah crazy.
His always happens. The government sloppily rolls something out to score PR points, then it comes out later that it was flawed all along and we have to pick up the tab.
They also made the CERB available to unemployed people on welfare. Several of my bum extended family members all happily collected $8000 each. Still sitting on welfare 5 years later. The government will never recoup that from people who refuse to work. It would also cost more to incarcerate them for not repaying.
They should have, at the very least, cross referenced the list of people applying for the benefit with the list of people on welfare - whose income was not impacted by the lockdowns.
Even then, people ineligible under the standards they had in place applied for "free money" without any care that they'd have to pay it back if they were found to be ineligible. My wife was encouraged to apply by a grocery store clerk who applied despite being employed.
Hindsight is 20/20, but it always seemed that the plan was going to be clawing back payments that were sent to ineligible applicants.
Well, many people who qualified for the CERB were typically employed. That was the point. It was an emergency relief benefit for employed people who were experiencing reduced hours, or reduced childcare options, reduced transportation options, etc. It wasn't exclusively for people who suddenly found themselves entirely out of work.
My sister worked at a Staples copy centre, and still lived with our parents, yet she qualified for the CERB for having her hours reduced, even though she was still going to work and didn't have many living expenses.
I'm don't doubt that many still clamored for the "free money' without being eligible, but the government reasoning was that it was too time consuming to look up each person's eligibility when so many Canadians were in dire need of help, fast.
My point is that people on welfare already exist in a database, so a simple automated scan of the applicants names and SINS to produce a binary yes/no output of whether they were already on welfare wouldn't have required the complexity of a CRA rep analyzing individual criteria. This was a huge oversight on their part.
Agreed, and I don't think that one extra verification step would have delayed payments to those who needed them most.
I started a business in 2018. I wasn't eligible for anything because I hadn't been in business for more than 3 years. Luckily my business was considered 'essential' so I was able to survive. A lot of others had up close up shop. So I can't complain.
But I'm glad all the publicly traded companies were able to get all the benefits then turn around and slash the workforce!
So many people in my old neighborhood at the time bragged how they got free money from the gov knowing full well odsp and walfare didn't count
It's worse than that. In some cases welfare and odsp case workers were ordering clients to apply for cerb knowing they were in eligible. The goal was to close the file temporarily. They didn't care that it would result in the client ending up in a pile of govt debt they could never repay
While it probably seems like it was a major issue since you interact with them more than others, I would assume that they are outliers.
If there are welfare people on CERB it highlights needs that arent being filled.
I know wealthy people that had incomes that were accepting CERB.
At the end of the day clawing back 8-12000 from people are on welfare is only gonna exacerbate an already bad homeless problem
There is no clawing back for this demographic. I'm not suggesting that they do. They can't withhold welfare payments people need to live. It's a non-issue. All they do is write some sternly worded letters and threaten to garnish any future wages, which only discourages the recipients from seeking employment down the road.
Considering welfare in this country is laughably less than $20,000/yr, a pitance that is incapable of preventing hardship on even the staunchest of tight wads... CERB was a catastrophe from the beginning that only fueled the worsening income divide.
If you already could barely live, and then you see all the middle class jackasses around you who didn't need the money get free money, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see it was a bad program from the beginning. Everyone should have been eligible for the program, regardless of working part time for a month before the pandemic started.
Every time I hear about how great CERB was, I usually know it is coming from someone who took it from a position of comfort themselves.
Interesting thought though - The CRA can go directly to a business and have that business shave a certain percentage off of their pay to go directly to the CRA for unpaid taxes.
So in this case, since welfare is provincial, what if the CRA went to the provinces and asked them to shave off up to 30% of an individual’s well fare cheque until they pay off what they took? That way the recipient has no choice. The money is taken from you before you receive, and you then will need to face the consequences of your actions.
I was curious so I looked up welfare rates for each province, and most welfare recipients are living on around $700 max per month, which is already not even close to enough to live on. Disability recipients only receive a few hundred dollars more. "Shaving off 30%" from this would kill a lot of people whose only crime was being poor and desperate.
I'm sorry, but "What if we starved and evicted people on assistance en masse for the crime of applying for a federal emergency benefit b/c provincial governments didn't give them enough to survive" is an insanely cruel idea.
You’re inventing a narrative about starving and evicting people to avoid addressing the lack of fiscal accountability. The federal gov isn’t an emergency ATM for provincial failures. If you think provincial welfare rates are too low, take it up with your MLA. You don't get to fix provincial policy by taking federal taxpayer funds…
Why should a middle class worker be forced to repay every cent of an ineligible benefit through wage garnishment while you argue that others should get a free pass just because their income comes from a different government pool? You’re advocating for inequity…. Think of it this way. If a charity gives you a free loaf of bread because you’re hungry, and you decide to take the cash from the register on your way out because the bread isn't enough for you, you’ve committed a crime. You should have to give back that money.
This is how the law is written and you’re arguing that following the law is an attack on the poor. The real attack is telling law abiding working citizens that their tax dollars are fair game for anyone who feels they aren't getting enough from their province…
The province tells them to pound sand. I'm not aware of any provincial welfare program that allows cheques to be garnished for anything but back child support. (Not that the CRA would do this anyway, since they can just seize your tax refunds until they're whole.)
The CRA has no ability to do what I mentioned. That’s why I started with “an interesting thought”.
Reality is, those who already live off the backs of working class people (those on welfare) will get away with this if they applied for CERB. Although they are not eligible, they would have received the money and now have virtually no way of paying it back. The CRA can hold back GST cheques etc but that will take a lifetime to get the money back from the poor.
It would have been nice to at least have a vetting process where the CRA would have declined those who are already on assistance programs. But that was never done. And now we are here.
You haven't been able to be incarcerated for debt/non-repayment since 1849 lol.
You'd have to nail them for fraud, which would cost far more to litigate than the value owing.
Implying everyone on welfare are 'bums' is incredibly wrong and offensive.
Yes, it would be offensive, but I didn't imply that everyone on welfare is a bum, because that's untrue. It was clear that I was specifically referring to my bum family members. They had a hotel party each month and blew the entire CERB on booze, blow, smokes, and god knows what else. By their own admission. Take your moral outrage somewhere else.
Makes for sensationalist headlines, but the fact is, the program was easily accessible to people who it probably shouldn't have been accessible to, and there's little to no chance it will ever be directly recovered from individuals.
Where most of it will be recovered from, is from garnishing HST rebates and tax refunds. It might take 10-20 years, but eventually those amounts will be zeroed off.
The covid related benefits have no interest applied to them. To the people who received them in error, it was basically an interest free non-repayable loan, that got many people through an otherwise very difficult time in history.
This is an interesting idea. Has the CRA documented this approach before, or something you’ve identified as a possible tool for non-repayment?
They should have prevented money from being sent to non Canadian addresses as a start. I remember a bunch of people from other countries getting cheques. Like that was a terrible oversight. Something like 2-4 billion went over seas. Never see a dollar of that again.
Citation needed
I mean it was all over the news but here's just one: https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/article/nearly-12-million-in-cerb-payments-sent-to-applicants-with-foreign-addresses/
Source: Their butt.
I have no sympathy for these people. I’m scraping by on disability and was not tempted to apply because I’m an honest person.
CRA fucked it up and they know it, and have no legal grounds to collect money from some of the people they claim weren't entitled to the benefit. The REALLY important thing they failed to do was to distinguish between NET income and GROSS income on the application eligibility criteria which essentially blurred the lines for many working class Canadians who needed that money to stay afloat, and who thought they were allowed to take this money.
The government at the time really just wanted to keep the economy going so they injected this cash quickly, without much thought of the mistakes they were making along the way. Sure there were bad actors that took advantage of this, but there were also good honest people that are now being targeted because of CRA's lack of clarity on eligibility requirements.
If only the CRA was so keen on recovering funds from the wealthy Canadians KPMG helped stash away over 200 billion in tax money, instead of going after working class Canadians who had nothing to fall back on, we'd be in a better position.
With the CRA its always go after the little guy, and let the big fish continue to steal. Want to read more? 10 billion from ordinary Canadians (for the most part) or 200 billion from the wealthy scammers? hmmm
https://www.taxfairness.ca/en/resources/news-views/cra-strikes-secret-deal-wealthy-kpmg-clients-isle-man-tax-scheme?utm_source=chatgpt.com
I am one of the little fish the CRA decided to come after for this net vs gross thing. I am a self employed music teacher. I barely survived covid. I would argue that almost no one can pay their bills on $1000 gross income (or even net!) also, which was the threshold. And there was no where cheaper to move. Gross income, I was eligible, with my deductions.
Then I got a letter that I owed everything- every single payment back - even the CSRB when I was almost on my deathbed with COVID, unable to work.
Had to file a consumer proposal basically just for the CRA debt. I had no credit cards or anything else. Just got absolutely raked by the CrA. Still looking for other employment but it’s next to impossible out there.
Thanks Canadian government. I would rage quit the industry and this country if I could.
Your point is well taken on the net vs gross issue, but how many people in this country have an income between $5K gross and $5K net? It can’t be that many, given that $5K net is not nearly enough to live on to begin with, so who are these people on this specific income bracket? Are we talking about teenagers or retirees here?
Great question and distinction. I would say that anyone on disability assistance would have been caught in this trap, and these are the people that needed it most.
Tbh I’d be fine if the CRA forgives all payments made to gross vs net confusion mistakes and moves on, these aren’t the rich. It’s something they should’ve done 5 years ago when the net v gross issue came up.
Sadly the article is lacking any details on how many people and how much that would cover, and the end of it is a waste as soon as they get to the CTF guy portion. Media needs to stop asking those partisan hypocrites their opinion.
The CRA notified people who received CERB payments in error towards the end of 2020 and the net vs. gross issue was already identified then. The article isn't raising isn't a new issue, it's an update on something the CRA has been working on resolving for the last 3-5 years.
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Bullshit. The law is what got passed by Parliament, not what the CRA puts on forms. There's a reasonable argument that people who were accidentally misled should not have to pay any penalties or interest... but the CRA isn't charging any penalties or interest anyway.
I think you just outed yourself as having written this using ChatGPT.
Legal arguments could include that that the gov had already established specific requirements when offering the money and that changing the criteria afterwards unfairly put many Canadians in a precarious financial trap. Many people would not have taken this money had they known they had to give it back. I can't think of any financial agreement someone signed where the lender was allowed to move the goalposts after the fact and were allowed to collect.
As for you qualm about my source of the article; I asked ChatGPT for a link, not to write an article. You can verify this by removing every part of the link after the ? (that's just the source of the link).
The criteria were set out in the legislation and were never changed.
Some people were confused about the difference between "gross revenue" and "income", but their confusion in no way alters the clear language of the legislation passed by Parliament.
There was no distinction made in Parliament or in the CRA documentation that mentions NET income.
The CRA applied what the government told them to do and the point was to get the money in the hands of Canadians as fast as possible.
And the government was basically stuck between 2 bad ideas. Either you forgoe the usual pre-payment assessment, which means money gets to Canadians when needed, but it means that you will likely lose money to ineligible recipients or you process each application the normal government way but that means it would have taken months to send it to recipients who needed it immediately.
And it is odd that even back then, the media cried rivers about cerb sent to individuals while not saying much about the much larger amounts sent to employers (cews for example) with as little oversight.
^ This. CEWS wasted 20x the money, but the media knows who not to criticize (because they'll get sued); better to shit on all us plebes.
Makes for a dramatic headline. But they knew the economy was about to collapse. Pushing money to keep millions of Canadians at home, with heat and food, was the point. It wasn’t a perfect system but it was quick and solved more problems than it created.
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I wonder what the conservative party would have done tbh
"We chose to spend $10B on economic stimulus" would be different than "It took us 5 years to figure out that we lost $10B to people who were never supposed to get it".
CERB needed to happen VERY fast in order to serve its purpose, and on balance it achieved its goal, but a perfect, no-mistakes implementation would have taken a year or more.
As others in this thread correctly said, they at LEAST could have taken a couple extra days to double-check against obvious things like "has this person been on welfare for the past three years, and has NOT suddenly lost their income?"
Many (probably most?) systems in all levels of government don't talk to each other. It would have taken a while to communicate between the different departments for each individual, and even longer to develop a system to do so automatically.
One in every seven dollars was sent out to people who did not qualify. That seems still seems excessively poor, the headline massages the scope if anything. To this day I'm surprised CEBA loans weren't a wasteful scandal on their own, that was a free $20,000 for so many businesses.
Edit: One in every 6 dollars.
It was a free $60,000 if your business was incorporated and didn't make it. Still sucks for the business, but there's virtually no recourse because there were no personal guarantees attached to the money.
That honestly is not as bad as I thought it'd be.
That being said, it was an emergency. There was no time to create a system to vet eligible recipients; people needed to pay bills and rent now.
You can look at it with the benefit of hindsight and moan over the numbers or the severity of the pandemic, but even a 2 week delay would have been devastating to so many people.
UNRELATED EDIT: Don't report people in this subreddit, or you risk getting banned in retaliation by the mods. Second time I've been banned shortly after reporting someone. Absolutely absurd.
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They knew the economy was going to collapse cause they stalled it. If I tell everyone to stop working ya I would know it was gonna collapse.
Agreed. It had great intentions. And some people took advantage of those great intentions when they were not who the program was for. And those people should pay up and be happy they don’t have to front the interest bill like a bank would make them.
It's not a binary, there is an in-between. We could have pushed money reasonably fast without enabling the magnitude of rampant fraud, just like we could have have more narrowly tailored eligibility to make reasonable checks and balances more practical without succumbing to any kind of extreme of letting the economy go belly up. Hindsight is 20/20 (no pun intended) but much of this was forseeable at the time and the government absolutely did knowingly make stupid decisions that deserve scrutiny so that we can learn from them going forward.
You have good points but I'm with the other commenter on this. We don't know how much longer CERB would have taken to roll out if they implemented a vetting process for applicants. My guess would be weeks, or even months of extra time considering all the disruptions going on.
Any such delay would have resulted in people unable to afford food, rent and utilities. Getting timely aid to eligible people in need is more important IMO than spending extra time setting up a vetting system.
We actually do know because the public sector prepared options for the government, it's just the government has exempted much of this from disclosure under freedom of information laws.
There are many reasonable "in-between options". What happened was the government opted to expand eligibility criteria too broadly beyond what could be reliably established through automated verification and then turned the CRA into a make work project trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube. That was a bad policy decision we should not repeat.
So, how long would it have taken to roll out a vetting system?
Exactly like the old adage... Some people would rather innocent people sometimes go to jail rather than a guilty person ever being free, some would rather a few guilty people go free if an innocent person never winds up in jail... I would rather everyone who needed the money got it and a few who didn't need it got it too, rather than people who really needed not getting it to prevent a few bad apples from getting anything. We can always take the time to hunt down the bad apples later.
100%
yes but there is a balance and imo the balance they went with is far too generous towards potential bad actors (as is tradition)
by dedicating more taxpayer dollars and govt resources to it, and we have a pretty shoddy track record of that if we're being real
Lots of people knowingly scammed the system for free money, and are now trying to claim ignorance, or that it should apply to them... they'll have to pay it back eventually.
Personally, I was laid off at the start of Covid, before CERB was announced, applied for EI, but got auto-shifted to CERB. The layoff only lasted a few weeks, and I tried to call to cancel CERB... but the phone lines were swamped those first few weeks ... eventually I was able to get it stopped, and at tax time I paid everything back.
The program was rolled out in a way, that when announced they even said, (paraphrasing) "that many people will get money they're not entitled to, and we'll sort it out later." ... it was better to do it this way, than to leave a deserving person without food, or shelter. They were clear about what the requirements were, and if people chose to apply while working, they were committing fraud... the fact the government is being nice and just asking for the money back is good. They could easily be charging them with fraud in the blatant cases, and/or charging interest.
And many people did not, there was legitimate confusion. Don't act like everyone who's being told to pay money back was knowingly committing fraud.
I didn't say everyone.
I repaid my 2k back, cerb messed it all up. I figured I'd just wait until they asked for it back, and they did. I applied for ei right at the start of COVID, as my employer gave us all a temporary layoff. It was a known period under 60 days. Then I ended up with the 2k cerb or whatever in my account, and ei started.
I made sure to only apply for ei, not cerb, but it still happened.
TLDR: I'm sure some of it was honest mistake, but I'm sure a lot of it was intentional.