The goverment of Alberta was negligent. Can I sue as a taxpayer?

Question

The govt of Alberta issued millions of dollars in Fuel Tax Rebates without identifying the claimants. The application form for rebates has the basic information to easily identiry claimants against the govt's data base information systems. The systems could be accessed within seconds but they did not do it. Hence public funds were disbursed by money managers with abandon in the millions. The motivation of the money managers was to disburse the budgeted amounts for the different programs. This program alone, disbursed $40 million dollars annually. When the incompetence was finally fixed, the disbursement for this particular rebate program dropped to $10 million dollars. This department of the government managed many rebate programs using the same level of incompetence for many years until it was brought to the attention of the authorities.

Answer 1

The gov't of Alberta does not respond well to threats of suing from individuals. In fact, it can get downright nasty. However, surprisingly, it does seem to be one of the only methods that some citizens can get their point across, particularly when it's a class action.

There have been several cases of individuals going up against the gov't for specifics of incompetence, or other distributions of funds causing harm to private persons, but the greatest successes by far are the class actions. Often, the gov't is so nervous of these that the settlement won't even make it into the papers. The most current is the class action from those on AISH who are claiming huge damages from the Klein cuts, and the subsequent insults to human dignity, decline into poverty, maimings and deaths that resulted. This follows on the heals of a class action suit by seniors for the very same thing. The out-of-court settlement on that was not disclosed.

If you feel strongly enough, I urge you find a few others and launch a class action against the gov't. With some publicity, you may be able to attract many others to your cause. It ain't cheap, but it's one of the only effective methods of chastising this anti-democratic regime...

Answer 2

Probably not. In general, there isn't sufficient individualized harm to a single taxpayer from this sort of incompetence to grant a taxpayer standing to even file a claim.

In addition, governments enjoy what's called "sovereign immunity" which means that you can't sue them unless they give you permission to.

If we all sued the government every time they were incompetent, we'd all pay 100% income taxes to pay the settlements.

Richard