AG Finds ‘Critical Weaknesses’ in Oversight of Foreign Students Program

The auditor general has found significant gaps in Ottawa’s foreign student program and in the RCMP’s recruitment drive, according to newly released reports.

The findings were included in Auditor General Karen Hogan’s latest performance audits, which were tabled in the House of Commons on March 23. The reports cover international student program reforms, RCMP recruitment, and the public service pay system.

One of the reports found that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) had failed to verify whether study permit holders were complying with the terms of their permits.

The immigration department had introduced a tool that verified 97 percent of acceptance letters from designated learning institutions submitted with study permit applications. However, the department only investigated 4,057 of the 150,000 cases flagged in 2023 and 2024 for possible violations of study permit conditions, the report said.

“The audit found critical weaknesses in the program’s integrity controls,” said a release from the auditor general.

In the cases that were investigated, limited action was taken to confirm non-compliance beyond contacting the student for more information, according to the report. The auditor general said about 41 percent of the investigations could not be completed because of a lack of response from the students.

Hogan said the immigration department has carried out reforms to reduce the number of new study permits, but it “fell short in other key areas.” She said the department needs to “act on the information it has to address integrity concerns in the program.”

Another “critical” weakness found in the program’s integrity controls was the department’s failure to follow up on 800 individuals suspected of misrepresenting information or using fraudulent documents in their applications. Most of these people later applied for other immigration permits while in Canada, with around 68 percent of them being approved. The auditor general said the department did not consider acting in any of the cases, which was “a serious concern.”

The department did not track which students were expected to leave Canada each year, or which ones had already left. Of the 549,000 individuals whose study permits expired in 2024, 93 percent were “allowed to remain in Canada,” the auditor general found.

The report said there were 39,500 people who should have left Canada because they no longer had immigration status. After coordinating with the Canada Border Services Agency, it was confirmed that around 40 percent of them had left the country.

The report also found that the immigration department issued fewer than half of the forecast number of new post-secondary study permits to control the growth of the program in 2024.

Many provinces saw decreases of 59 percent or more in new study permits in 2024, despite anticipating drops of 10 percent or less. The number fell 68 percent in Prince Edward Island, 63 percent in Saskatchewan, 62 percent in Manitoba, and 59 percent in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The auditor general recommended the department work with provinces to refine study permit allocations, improve its responses to identifying fraudulent documentation, and strengthen controls on permit extensions by adjusting its risk assessments.

Immigration Minister Lena Diab said in a statement that the department accepted the auditor general’s recommendations, and thanked the office for its audit. Diab said while international students benefit Canada, the system must be “sustainable, credible and well managed.”

Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner, who serves as her party’s shadow immigration minister, told reporters that the auditor general’s report showed that the immigration department does not have “adequate checks and balances to prevent fraud.”

“The reality is, today, I don’t see any change. They claim the system’s under control, and this auditor general report says the exact opposite,” she said in Ottawa on March 23.

RCMP Recruitment

A separate report released by Hogan’s office the same day found the RCMP failed to recruit and post new police officers in their first assignments fast enough to meet the force’s operational needs.

The RCMP has identified recruitment as a top priority, but has not accurately determined the total number of police officers needed to fully staff the force, according to the auditor general. The RCMP’s reported recruitment targets have fallen short of its actual staffing needs, and it has not recruited as many police officers as needed, the report said.

Nine of the RCMP’s 11 divisions had vacancy rates above the RCMP’s critical threshold of 7 percent as of September 2025, despite a long-standing goal of 2.6 percent. “These high vacancy rates pose a clear risk to the RCMP’s ability to maintain operational capacity and deliver policing services in all business lines,” the report said.

Additionally, the RCMP failed to meet its target processing time for 97 percent of applications, which made it more difficult to fill training classes with enough cadets. This led to the cancellation of some classes, and the RCMP trained fewer cadets than it had expected.

The auditor general noted that the RCMP changed its application approach in 2023 by allowing new police officers to choose the division for their first assignment if there was a vacancy, with the change resulting in 6,000 more applications than in the previous year.

“However, the change also led to an unintended outcome—chronic vacancies in some divisions increased,” the report said.

When given the choice, new RCMP recruits gravitated toward British Columbia and parts of Atlantic Canada, while the prairie provinces struggled to attract officers despite higher need, according to the report.

This led to the RCMP reversing the change in July 2025, going back to assigning new police officers to divisions according to operational needs.

The report added that a chronic shortage of police officers increase the risk of absences and burnout, which could reduce the RCMP’s effectiveness and harm Canada’s national security.

A 2025 report from the RCMP’s Management Advisory Board found the number of officers on long-term off-duty sick leave (LTODSL) has reached an all-time high, and has become an “area of concern” for frontline officers and senior leadership. The report said the number of members with LTODSL had increased by 184 percent from 2010 to 2024, and is now “one of the most critical issues” facing the RCMP.

The report recommended that the RCMP assess how many officers it needs to meet operational requirements, align recruitment targets accordingly, and expand training capacity to ensure enough cadets graduate to meet operational demands.

Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree said he accepted the findings and recommendations of the auditor general, saying they provide a “clear path forward to modernize recruitment processes and will be incorporated in the RCMP’s plan to hire the people it needs to serve communities across Canada.”

A third auditor general report released the same day found the federal government needs to replace the error-prone Phoenix pay system with the Dayforce platform before March 2031. The report said the government had made “limited” progress in eliminating the backlog of payment transactions, which stood at more than 233,000 and affected at least 133,000 federal employees as of Sept. 30, 2025.

That report also found the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat and Public Services and Procurement Canada had been managing the transition to the new system well, and that the project will provide value for money once it is fully implemented.