Entitled To Entitlements During COVID
"It would be erroneous to conclude [that the Government of Canada's emergency COVID plan to rescue Canadians hit hard through unemployment, in CERB payments to those making application without a 2019 tax return, were being paid out to] fraudsters or to non-eligible individuals.""[Taxpayers could be assured that officials would eventually check claims against upcoming tax returns and payroll records to discover any possible instances of wrongful payments]."Canada Revenue Agency"The point was to replace income that was lost due to the pandemic, lost because of government regulations shuttering the economy to control the virus."Lindsay Tedds, tax policy expert, University of Calgary
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In the House of Commons the opposition Conservatives enquired of the anomaly when 823,580 recipients of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit -- instituted by the Liberal government to compensate the unemployed for lost work due to COVID lockdown -- for whom the Canada Revenue Agency had no 2019 income information when data was compiled. When in fact the eligibility rules for making application for the $2,000 monthly CERB payments had no requirement for filing a tax return.
Opposition finance critic Pierre Pollievre felt it fair enough that citizens losing employment as a result of COVID lockdowns should receive the CERB, but instances of fraud should concern the government. What, he asked, was the government doing to make certain "the money didn't go to people who didn't earn the right to receive it". The response from Canada's finance minister was that any fraud would be "completely unacceptable", and no one could take issue with that. It's just that the government made no effort to ensure that fraud would not take place.
Yet, in the real world of self-entitled opportunists it would appear that a huge number of Canadians acted with alacrity and with larcenous ethical concerns set aside made application for COVID aid, a key benefit meant to restore a level of economic certainty to the hundreds of thousands of workers whose employment was lost during the pandemic. Since March, the Liberal government rolled out payments to the tune of $81.6 million, benefiting 8.9 million people.
Most applicants reflected people earning under $47,630 in 2019, according to the Canada Revenue Agency. But they were not the only ones to apply for the benefit. Canada Revenue Agency numbers indicate that at least 114,620 individuals earning between $100,000 and $200,000 applied for the CERB benefit, with another 14,070 people who earned over $210,000 also applying for the benefit. CERB was available to anyone who had made at least $5,000 in the preceding 12 months and saw their income crash as a result of the pandemic.
It speaks to the design of the program that within the first two days of the initial rollout of the CERB, over 1.7 million Canadians applied, with that number since ballooned past eight million applicants. When payouts began rolling out, over 220,000 people received double payments, amounting in total to more than $442 million in overpayments. Canadians with conscience reported irregularities, some among them explaining receipt of $4,000 rather than the $2,000 monthly they were entitled to.
Labels: Canada Emergency Response Benefit, COVID-19, Government of Canada, Unemployment
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, November 21, 2020
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