Auditor General shakes Canada’s international student file as oversight lags behind red flags

By Tahani Elghazaly
Published March 24, 2026

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Canada’s Auditor General has raised fresh concerns over the integrity of the international student system, concluding that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada succeeded in reducing new study permits but did not effectively implement key reforms tied to oversight, suspected non-compliance, and fraud detection.

The report says 153,324 international students were flagged in 2023 and 2024 as potentially non-compliant, yet only 4,057 investigations were launched. Of those, 3,105 were completed, 915 were cancelled, and 37 remained ongoing. Among the completed cases, 1,401 students were confirmed to be studying, 1,654 did not respond to the department, and only 50 were confirmed to be non-compliant.

The numbers point to a deeper weakness than suspicious cases alone: the government’s follow-up capacity did not match the scale of the alerts generated inside the system. The Auditor General said most students flagged for potential non-compliance were not actually being investigated, turning the issue into a combined education, immigration, and public-integrity story.

The audit did, however, credit one major reform already in place. Since December 2023, the new letter-of-acceptance verification system reviewed 841,403 applications, verified 791,793 as genuine, flagged 12,131 for potential fraud, and found that 8,666 acceptance letters had been cancelled by designated learning institutions. Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab said the government accepts the Auditor General’s recommendations and will improve follow-up where suspected fraud or non-compliance is identified, while arguing that broader reforms will continue through 2027.