The report asserts that the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship (IRC) department is lacking a systematic method of identifying fraud risks.
"We found that (IRC) was not adequately detecting and preventing fraud in the citizenship program," the audit states. "People were granted citizenship based on incomplete information or without all of the necessary checks being done.”
According to Reuters, a widespread problem found that a single address had been used by over 50 applicants over a seven-year time frame, and seven of those were granted citizenship.
The audit asserts that the system is failing to weed out those who have been convicted of serious crimes, submitted fraudulent paperwork, or married solely for citizenship.
The information gathered in the report is from an audit which was conducted from July 2014 through October 2015.
This comes at a time when many in the US are already skeptical of the Canadian government’s decision to accept 25,000 Syrian refugees, all of whose paperwork would be handled by the IRC department. The subject of the possibility of terrorists mixing in with refugees and crossing the border to the US from Canada was a topic of discussion within the Senate Homeland Security Committee in February.
