MANITOULIN—The president of the Manitoulin-North Shore War Pensioners of Canada (WPC) says that if they weren’t a member of the Canadian government, the person(s) responsible for a Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) error involving $165 million would be turfed out of their job.
“The lack of financial awareness is nothing more than government incompetence,” stated Colin Pick. “If this involved non-government personnel, someone would be hung out to dry for this situation. $165 million is no small error. Yet, I can bet no action will be taken other than a slap on the wrist for the persons involved in the government office.”
CBC News reported on January 11 that in 2001 the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien made what appeared to be an innocuous change to federal tax forms. It separated federal and provincial tax exemptions, shuffling the basic personal tax credit from one part of the document to another.
Staff at Veterans Affairs, who administer disability awards and pensions, did not pick up on the modification to the tax law for several years and ended up short-changing former soldiers, most of them elderly, who received disability pensions and awards benefits. The error continued through the following governments of Paul Martin and Conservative Stephen Harper. It was a mistake that ballooned to a multi-million dollar fiscal mess that the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau began to clean up last fall.
CBC News reported that it has obtained hundreds of pages of documents under access to information legislation and has conducted a series of background interviews with current and former federal officials to understand how the extraordinary blunder that shortchanged up to 272,000 disabled veterans of roughly $165 million came to pass. The documents show how officials traced the confusion back to the change in the forms and in the Income Tax Act. It was also uncovered that once the error was discovered, it was quietly fixed by Veterans Affairs in 2010 but no effort was made to notify or reimburse those affected by the error.
Mr. Pick said, “twice in previous years, VAC has suddenly found millions of dollars that were returned to government and spent on something else other than the veterans it was intended for; it’s just not acceptable when we still have homeless vets and several injured vets who are in financial need.”
A significant number of the affected veterans, an estimated 170,000, have since passed away. While the Canadian government has pledged to repay those veteran’s estates, documents reveal that Veterans Affairs does not keep track of next-of-kin and therefore has no ready means of finding them.
CBC News noted no one was held accountable for covering up the mistake and the Liberal government has shown no interest in conducting a follow-up investigation to get to the bottom of the matter.
