The agglomeration of Quebec and the city of Quebec continue to cancel the amounts owed to them, which, however, have remained unpaid for several years. In 2023, the municipal government wrote off $805,413 in debt. This is the largest amount since the city reviewed its policy in this area.
The amount will be split mainly between the city and the Quebec agglomeration. The towns of L’Ancienne-Lorette and Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures account for a total of $4,151 of this. A mere $350 goes to the Capital Transport Network.
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According to the decision summary, the majority of the amounts written off are the result of a death or unsuccessful enforcement for 10 years or more.
Six million backlogs have to be made up
In 2015, the city adopted its new policy for managing the closure of certain municipal court dockets. Since then, every year the legal department submits the list of debts that require authorization from the relevant authorities to be written off.
This measure allows for better management of claims, reports a spokesman for the city of Quebec.
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In 2019, the Auditor General judged the pace to be inadequate. In a report he pointed out that the value of bad debts was too high. At the end of 2018, around 20,000 files with $6 million in debts were still unpaid five years after they were collected.
Since then, the city has been in a catching-up phase; She estimates that it will take ten years to write off the entire accumulated amount, with an average of $600,000 per year.
In 2020, the city had written off more than $500,000 in unpaid debt, a record at the time.
In 2022 and 2023, the city administration said it worked intensively to catch up on the backlog of closing very old files. For this reason, the depreciation amounts for these two years are particularly high.