Canada’s Government Lost, Broke, or Got Took for $250 Million Worth of Stuff Last Year — Including Guns

The Canadian government has a hard time hanging on to its things.

In the last year, Ottawa lost $253,947,916 through fraud, tax evasion, damage, smuggling, accident, or general screw-up. Of that amount, it managed to only recoup less than $37 million. Another $18 million, the government is sure, is gone for good.

That total, which is published every year when the government releases its full financials, includes everything from accidental direct deposits to car crashes and straight-up theft and fraud.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest leakage from the public purse were tax cheats. The Canada Revenue Agency, according to the report, is currently trying to recover over $100 million in missing tax revenue — only a fraction of which they managed to recover through the courts.

But the report shows that some honest ineptitude cost the government a chunk of change in 2014-2015 fiscal year.

The Department of National Defense, for example, says it lost roughly $575,000 in "military specific equipment," and had another 1,128 cases, worth some $130,000, of weapons and accessories go missing.

Hundreds of cell phones, laptops, and iPads went missing across all departments. The Parliament of Canada even managed to lose a television.

Car accidents and vandalism to government cars also cost millions. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police alone reported nearly 1,000 cases of damage to their vehicles, totalling nearly $3 million.

In the past, the Privacy Commissioner has scolded departments for misplacing or losing USB keys that contain personal and private information. This report shows that dozens of USB keys, although not necessarily carrying sensitive information, either went missing or were stolen from the departments of health, industry, aboriginal affairs, and natural resources. The Supreme Court of Canada misplaced a USB, but the report notes that it was encrypted — which was a recommendation from the Privacy Commissioner on how to avoid losing Canadians' data.

Some of the items are generally inexplicable. The Courts Administration Service lost one laptop, and tagged the price at $11,000. The Department of Foreign Affairs reported the "loss of content of official mail," and priced the lost contents at $50,000. It does not expect to find the contents, whatever those are. Foreign Affairs is the only department that reported losing mail, and did so last year, as well: then, it reported the loss as $70,000.

Foreign Affairs also had a firebug problem last year. A fire at Canadian residences in New Delhi and Mexico rang up a few hundred dollars in damages, while two different fires at residences for Canadian staff in Abuja, Nigeria, cost the government nearly $14,000 to repair.

One particularly devious criminal managed to steal a security camera. Unsurprisingly, the government does not expect to solve that crime, and wrote off the $265.

The magnitude of the loss is not exactly new. The government reports hundreds of millions in losses every year, although the government appeared to do a better job at averting mistakes this year — it reported just $10 million in accidental losses in the past year, as opposed to nearly $60 million the year prior.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter: @justin_ling

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