Clampdown on federal student debt leads to small bump in collections
Posted Dec 23, 2016 02:48:46 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
OTTAWA – A concerted effort by federal officials to round up more money from defaulted student loan borrowers has yielded a small increase in collections.
The Canada Revenue Agency says it was able to collect $208.8 million this year, about $10 million more than it did two years when the government decided that loan write-offs had spun out of control and collection efforts needed to ramp up.
The year-over-year increases, though, have been relatively small: a two-per-cent increase between 2014 and 2015, and a three-per-cent increase between this year and last.
Those increases are smaller than the 4.5-per-cent increase in collections between 2013 and 2014 when the agency and the department in charge of the student loan regime began sharing more information to aid in collection efforts.
The Liberals’ first budget offered a new tool for the CRA in its collection efforts: legal changes for it to use tax information for the purpose of collecting debts from programs overseen by Employment and Social Development Canada.
A spokeswoman for the CRA said the agency is looking at ways to use the new powers in its work.
