Trudeau’s regulators knew of CERB abuse just weeks into program

This was revealed during the House of Commons Finance Committee on Wednesday. Auditors are yet to fully understand the extent of the abuse that occurred under CERB.

The CERB program cost the taxpayer $82 billion. It gave out $2,000 per month to those who had been made unemployed as a result of the pandemic.

"Several of the banks started noticing these types of suspicious deposits," said one official. He later said that he noticed suspicious payments only weeks into the CERB program.

"FINTRAC started to receive suspicious transaction reports from our reporting entities around the month of June," he said.

"It was really for the most part our large financial institutions that were reporting on a number of CERB benefits that were coming in with certain clients, and they would see clients receiving benefits under different names and so forth."

The official also suggested that criminal organizations took advantage of this program. He went on to say that he was "not in a position to actually quantify the amount."

The Trudeau government initially budgeted $24 billion for the CERB program. This vastly underestimated the actual cost of the program, which has reached an astonishing $81.6 billion by the time it was suspended.