Video—Detecting and Preventing Fraud in the Citizenship Program

Video Transcript

There are advantages to being a Canadian citizen, either for example, some countries don’t require a visa for Canadian citizens to enter the country. You can get access to benefits like health benefits in Canada, if you’re a Canadian citizen.

So it’s very important for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to make sure they are appropriately detecting and preventing people who are trying to obtain Canadian citizenship through fraudulent means.

Well, the most pressing issue really is that they’re not using the information they have to identify cases of people who may be trying to obtain Canadian citizenship through fraudulent means. So they have information about addresses, for example, that could indicate that somebody is using a fraudulent or a problematic address. But they’re not using that information to do further investigations into those cases.

We found, for example, that in one situation, there were 50 people that had provided the same address. So, said they were living in the same address over overlapping periods of time. But Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada didn’t identify that those people were supplying that same address. When people are supplying the same address over overlapping periods of time, it could be an indication that there could be an attempt to get citizenship through fraudulent means but the department didn’t do any further investigation on those cases.