Canada Service centre documents that display Employment Insurance options are pictured in Ottawa on Tuesday, July 7, 2015. Federal officials say a fourth straight year of jumps in the volume and value of fraudulent employment insurance claims is a sign that efforts to root out wrongful payments is working. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
October 24, 2018 - 12:02 PM
OTTAWA - Government spending documents show employment insurance fraud has hit a five-year high. Officials say its the result of government improvements to how it finds and deals with wrongful payments.
Here are a few key figures:
104,179: Incidents of EI fraud in 2017-18 fiscal year
$177 million: Combined value of those fraud cases
$74,137: Total amount that federal officials don't ever expect to collect
38.7: Percentage increase in the value of fraud from five years prior
$44.1 million: Amount federal officials recovered in wrongful payments in the 2017-18 fiscal year
$19.7 billion: Amount spent on employment insurance benefits in the last fiscal year
0.9: Percentage of all EI spending last fiscal year that was marked as fraud
$38.4 billion: Old age security payments made in the 2017-18 fiscal year
10: Cases of old age security fraud the same year
$494,490: Value of wrongful payments identified in the 2017-18 fiscal year
0.001: Percentage of all old age security spending last fiscal year that was marked as fraud
(Source: Public Accounts of Canada)
News from © The Canadian Press, 2018