My parents are in a kerfuffle with some agency over COVID funds.

My dad got laid off around the time of COVID for unrelated reasons, not because of COVID or shutdowns in anyway.

He then applied for employment insurance since he qualified.

Without anyone asking, he somehow was instead put him on some sort of COVID EI thing instead of regular EI

Then later on someone decided the COVID EI thing needs to be reimbursed or something so they are asking for all the money back despite the fact he would have gotten more money from regular EI and never asked for the COVID stuff.

It's been like 4 years now and they are still trying to get the money back and won't even talk to them to try and fix the situation, just keep sending letters.

The Canadian Revenue Agency is incredibly incompetent. It's shameful. This COVID benefits fiasco is only one example.

My in-laws have had problems with the CRA because they screwed up in their documentation about their taxes. They lost documents that had been sent to them during some office move or something. They have sent mail for 5 years where we'd receive up to 5 letters per week about either them owing money or the CRA owing them money or that everything balanced out, etc. Non stop. It was insane how many letters we received. The absolute waste in paper was incredible.

Then my in-laws sold a property they had here. And because they are non-residents and they had all these problems with the CRA, the CRA decided to withhold the money from the sale of the property until everything was resolved. That's several hundreds of thousands of dollars stuck in limbo. It's been 3-4 years now. And I think after a certain number of years, if it hasn't been resolved the CRA keeps the money. That's a lifetime worth of savings that just gets seized because of their incompetence.

Their notary is going nuts trying to reach the CRA and get some answers, but nobody picks up. It's wild!

At the time, the messaging was very clear that receiving the benefit did not mean you were eligible, since it was more important to get the money in peoples' hands quickly. I honestly don't have a lot of sympathy for ineligible people who now have to pay it back

Remember, COVID benefits to working people = claw back every last cent paid out. Loans paid to large multinational corporations = forgive those loans! The poor corpos just needed the extra money.

This shit is why I didn't apply for the COVID benefit.

NGL if the government makes an error in your favor they should just write it off and print the equivalent amount of new money.