Employment insurance (EI) fraud in Canada has reached a five-year high, according to a new report by the federal government.
Public accounts documents list more than 104,000 incidents of fraudulent EI claims totaling $177 million in the 2017-18 fiscal year.
Government officials in Ottawa expect eventually to collect $132.8 million of the wrongful payments identified in the fiscal year that ended in March, and plan to write off about $74,000 of them.
This year is the fourth consecutive year that EI fraud figures have risen, a fact that Ottawa attributes to increased efforts by Employment and Social Development Canada to identify and prosecute fraudulent claims cases.
However, the amount of EI fraud is tiny compared to the overall amount spent on benefits for the unemployed, new parents on leave, and workers who need time off due to illness or to care for an ailing family member. EI spending in Canada between April 2017 and March 2018 totaled $19.7 billion. The value of fraudulent claims amounted to less than 1% of total spending.
Government officials in Ottawa must collect money from fraudulent EI claims within six years of identifying a wrongful payment or write it off.
