OTTAWA, (Reuters) – Canada’s government is doing a bad job of weeding out fraudulent citizenship applications and this means ineligible people can obtain Canadian passports, the country’s top watchdog said yesterday.
The findings could alarm U.S. critics already worried by what they say are the security risks posed by the new Liberal government’s decision to quickly accept 25,000 Syrian refugees after taking power last November.
Auditor General Michael Ferguson said in a report he had discovered a series of problems in the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship (IRC) department, which is responsible for making sure only eligible people can become Canadian nationals.
“We found that (IRC) was not adequately detecting and preventing fraud in the citizenship program,” concluded the audit, which said officials lacked a systematic method of identifying and documenting fraud risks.
“People were granted citizenship based on incomplete information or without all of the necessary checks being done,” it said. The audit covered the period from July 2014 to October 2015, when the former Conservative government was in power.
More than 260,000 people became Canadian citizens in 2014, an all-time record. Canada has a population of around 36 million.
The system is supposed to weed out people convicted of serious offenses, those who have faked residency papers or have entered into marriages of convenience.
But Ferguson said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the border security agency were doing a poor job of sharing data about criminal charges and potential residency fraud. For example, one address was not identified as a problem even though it had been used over a seven-year period by at least 50 applicants, seven of whom were granted citizenship.
