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  3. The Conservative government will face difficulty proving that its plan to au

The Conservative government will face difficulty proving that its plan to au

游客2023-08-09  26
问题     The Conservative government will face difficulty proving that its plan to automatically enroll eligible Canadians in the Old Age Security plan will save taxpayers money. An audit on the first phase of the program has found the department responsible, Employment and Social Development Canada(ESDC), couldn’t show "expected benefits" from the program because it has no measurable targets.
    The government plans to gradually increase the age of eligibility for OAS benefits to 67 from 65 starting in 2023, but it plans to more quickly introduce automatic enrollment for eligible Canadians. The Tories argue the move will help federal coffers through reduced benefit costs and reduced service spending. The audit, however, concluded the department’ s targets "were not documented, specific or measurable." For instance, there were no "measurable targets" set for one of the keys to the government’s strategy: "improve services to Canadians." According to the audit, the department did plan to use one specific measurement to gauge effectiveness: the number of Canadians who could be enrolled automatically versus those who are actually enrolled.
    The auditor, however, argued that this shouldn’t be used to show the government was reducing "costly paper processing", because some seniors who were auto-enrolled would still have to file paper applications "for a number of reasons" — such as to defer taking the OAS. "With limited baseline information on the costs for paper application processing, it will be difficult to demonstrate the planned productivity improvements and their associated savings," the auditors wrote in their report, dated February 2014 but only published a few weeks ago.
    The government announced in the 2012 budget the eligibility age would change to 67 from 65, but it would be phased in over six years, starting in 2023. That means anyone who was 56 or older as of March of this year won’t be affected.
    The government estimated the savings at $10.8 billion annually starting in 2030, when 9.3 million Canadians are projected to be eligible for OAS benefits—almost double the 4.7 million eligible in 2010. To further reduce costs, the government planned to automatically enroll eligible Canadians and eliminate the need for seniors to receive and return a mailed enrollment form.
    The audit team reviewing the first phase of the OAS changes concluded ESDC had enough oversight for the first phase of the project, which was to use information already available within the department and to identify Canadians for possible automatic enrollment. However, auditors had concerns with how the department planned to prove in the long-term that the changes to the OAS program were having their intended effects. For example, "there is currently limited capacity to monitor the additional workload introduced by the implementation of automatic enrollment," they wrote. [br] Paragraph six intends to show that_____.
选项 A、Audit team disapproves ESDC
B、Audit team’ s comments on the work done by ESDC
C、Audit team’s concern about the OAS program
D、Audit team’ s attitude towards automatic enrollment
答案 B
解析 推断题。第六段主要介绍了审计组对于加拿大就业和社会发展对于老年保障所做的改革的评价。表扬了它有远见，提出用现有信息来预测可能的自动注册老年保障的市民。同时对于如何证明改革的效果表示担忧，所以B项符合。A、D项第六段没有提到。C项讲审计的担忧只是一部分，不够全面。因此，正确答案是B。
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