(Bloomberg) -- The Canadian government rolled out C$49 billion ($34.8 billion) in loans to businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic without “due regard for value for money,” the country’s auditor general said.
About C$3.5 billion was paid out to more than 77,000 ineligible businesses that applied to the Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA), Karen Hogan concluded in a report on Monday. That’s 9% of the nearly 900,000 Canadian businesses that received loans through the program, which was introduced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government in 2020.
The interest-free loans of up to C$60,000 were quickly doled out to help small and medium-sized Canadian firms with payroll, rent and insurance as businesses were shuttered to control the spread of the coronavirus. Up to C$20,000 was forgivable if firms repaid by a certain date.
But while the government moved swiftly to support struggling businesses, the initiative was plagued by “poor program management and oversight failure,” Hogan’s office said in a news release.
“Unlike other Covid-19 programs, CEBA is a loan program with repayments that will be ongoing for several years while action on defaulted loans is just beginning,” she said in the release. “Value for money will be further compromised without better monitoring and improved plans to recover defaulted loans.”
The report is also critical of Export Development Canada’s procurement processes, which the auditor general said “did not follow principles of fairness and transparency” as it chose a vendor for its loan accounting system.
The government corporation “prioritized quick implementation of program changes by relying on sole-source contracts with a single vendor without strong checks and balances in place,” the auditor said. It relied on Accenture to administer the program and used “a series of non-competitive contracts,” which ultimately resulted in the company awarding a major contract to one of its own subsidiaries.
Accenture referred questions to EDC, which said in a statement that the majority of ineligible recipients estimated by the auditor have already been identified by the corporation and disqualified from partial loan forgiveness.
“This was a net-new program with no precedent or instruction manual to follow,” spokesman Todd Winterhalt said. “EDC welcomes the opportunity to continuously improve our practices, which is why we have accepted the OAG’s recommendations, many of which we have already taken steps to address.”
The auditor general also slammed Global Affairs Canada and the Finance Department for failing to “effectively” oversee CEBA, saying “neither department took accountability for the program, leaving many basic program elements, such as life cycle planning, either delayed or incomplete.”
In a joint statement, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Small Business Minister Rechie Valdez said while the report offers some useful recommendations, it fails to properly acknowledge that the program “was designed and delivered during a global pandemic.”
“Within less than two weeks, the federal government stood up new, emergency support for 898,000 small businesses across the country. This was a historic, national effort, at a time of crisis, to support our small business owners and their employees,” the ministers said.
Still, the report’s findings offer further evidence of the consequences of the speedy rollout of the pandemic-era loan and compensation programs. Combined with other direct transfers to individuals, it’s increasingly clear that some spending went to business owners and workers who shouldn’t have received the funds in the first place.
The government pushed back the deadline to repay CEBA loans multiple times, ultimately requiring firms to return the funds by Jan. 18 of this year to receive the forgivable portion, or by March 28 if they had sought refinancing from a financial institution. After that, the debts converted to term loans at a 5% rate, with full repayment due by the end of 2026.
As of the end of March, there were some C$8.5 billion in CEBA loans still to be repaid, Hogan said in the report.
In 2022, the auditor general released a report showing some C$4.6 billion in overpayments to ineligible recipients of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, a program meant to support individual workers during Covid-19, as well as some some C$27.4 billion in expenditures that “should be investigated further.” The spending increased the federal government’s debt levels by about two-thirds, pushing the country’s debt to GDP ratio above 40%.
Business insolvencies spiked at the beginning of 2024, coinciding with the repayment deadline for the CEBA loans. Some economists have suggested the bankruptcies are evidence of so-called “zombie” firms that were propped up by the loans during the pandemic but closed after repayment.
--With assistance from Jay Zhao-Murray.
(Adds Export Development Canada’s response in paragraphs eight-nine. Earlier updates added Accenture referring questions to EDC and comment from the ministers responsible.)
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