A by-the-numbers look at spending and fraud in employment, old age benefits

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)