Canada granted citizenship to more than 260,000 immigrants in 2014.
AB Wire
Canada’s Auditor General, in a report introduced in Parliament, said that the country is granting citizenship to immigrants without conducting proper background checks, potentially allowing newcomers with criminal backgrounds and fraudulent documents to obtain legal status.
Between June 2014 and October of last year, the period audited, immigration officials were “not adequately detecting and preventing fraud” among citizenship applications, according to Auditor General Michael Ferguson, reported The Wall Street Journal. For instance, a database meant to raise red flags on suspicious cases either wasn’t updated frequently or entries were riddled with errors, he said.
“This finding matters because ineligible individuals may obtain Canadian citizenship and receive benefits to which they are not entitled,” Ferguson said. He noted that the right to enter and leave the country without restrictions is one of those benefits.
Canada granted citizenship to more than 260,000 immigrants in 2014, ranking it first among Group of 20 countries on a per capita basis, and aims to increase its intake to up to 305,000 newcomers in 2016. Most immigrants enter under programs aimed at boosting the economy by attracting workers with specific job skills, but some enter as part of family reunification and refugee programs, the Journal reported.
Ferguson said his office discovered 50 cases of people trying to obtain Canadian citizenship through fraudulent means, by reviewing a sample of successful applications issued up to last June.
The Globe and Mail reported that the five-chapter report found that citizenship officers did not consistently apply their own methods to identify and prevent fraud when dealing with suspicious immigration documents, such as altered passports. For example, in one region, citizenship officers did not seize any suspicious documents for in-depth analysis since at least 2010, while they did in another.
It was also found that citizenship officers did not have the information they needed to properly identify “problem addresses” when making decisions to grant citizenship. Problem addresses are those known or suspected to be associated with fraud, and used by citizenship applicants to meet residency requirements for citizenship.
“For example, one address was not identified as a problem even though it had been used by 50 different applicants, seven of whom were granted citizenship,” said Ferguson.
The problem was further complicated by poor sharing of information with the RCMP, which provides information about criminal behavior among permanent residents, and the Canada Border Services Agency, which leads investigations of immigration fraud, said the report.