I’d interested to see how much outstanding is actually people gaming the system, vs people that got caught up in a system that was intentionally designed to get money in people m’s hands and figure it out later. In my wife’s case, she qualified for CERB and received it, then the wage subsidy program came out and applied retroactively. She was made retroactively ineligible with no clear way to return the excess and when CRA dod reach out for repayment they made the process much more painful than it should have been.

Then there’s things like the benefits would be front-loaded, so presumably anybody that was laid off and then found employment would have ended up with some amount owing. Somme people that would have been eligible for regular EI got moved to CERB and were then found in-eligible for that. There was also a lot confusion about how it applied to things like seasonal workers or people in positions that may or may not have ended during the time that CERB was available.