CRA does not like to publicize it much but ID theft has been a growing problem for years. People file a phony tax return in your name very early on in the tax filing season, collect a refund, and that leaves you with sorting out the details with CRA.  The agency doesn't really care, though, because the money that they send you isn't theirs, it belongs to the government. I mean, it's not part of their budget. Dedicating a group to fighting ID fraud and making changes to their computer systems to make it harder for people to do this has been 'under consideration' for many years. The problem is that would cost THEM money (from their budget) to implement, and the money saved isn't 'theirs'.  The changes would probably save the government, overall, a hundred or more dollars for every dollar spent, but that's not how departments look at things. Until the government orders them to do something about it they won't.