Hon. Denise Batters: Senator Gold, the Auditor General noted in her recent COVID pandemic spending report that, “As of September 2022, the agency and the department had identified employees that claimed COVID-19 benefits.”

In that quote, “the agency” is the Canada Revenue Agency, and “the department” is Employment and Social Development Canada.

When MPs last week questioned officials from these two federal government entities that ran the CERB program about this, they were informed that 49 employees at the employment department were fired for claiming the benefit for themselves. The tax agency official would not state how many cases of employee CERB fraud had occurred at that government agency, saying only that it was “not many.”

Neither department referred these federal government employees found in such flagrant violations to law enforcement. Why not?