Resettlement Assistance Program (RAP): Income support management: Financial commitments and forecasts

On this page

• Financial commitments and forecasts
• File preparation
• Storage and Retention

Financial commitments and forecasts

Up-to-date information on RAP must be maintained by the local or regional office concerning commitment expenditures and forecasts. This allows NHQ-Finance to determine if the funds allocated to this program are sufficient or if additional funds must be found.

RAP officers should enter and forecast a commitment for each client as close as possible to actual anticipated costs. Commitments should be updated monthly to correspond with any changes in client situation that may affect their entitlement.

RAP officers and supervisors should avoid:

• over-commitment that results in excess slippage at the end of the year or
• under-commitment that results in lack of budget control

File preparation

Local IRCC officers must ensure that all income support files are properly processed and documented.

A file for each RAP client must be created for audit purposes, for more information on what documents should be kept in the RAP file, consult the Storage and Retention Map for RAP-IS.

Immigration Documents that can be found in GCMS do not need to be collected by RAP staff. Electronic versions of these documents can be found under the REF-OVS application (G#) in GCMS, therefore these documents should not be printed or copied to the RAP-IS Application (IS#):

• Confirmation of Permanent Residence (COPR)
• Interim Federal Health (IFH)
• Immigration Loans Program - Transportation Loan (ILP)
• Temporary resident permit (TRP)
• Single Journey Travel Document (SJTD)
• Destination Matching Request (DMR)
• Notification of Arrival Transmission (NAT)

In addition to the immigration documents, RAP program staff should not retain information related to the clients SIN (after entry into SAP) or Direct Deposit information.

Storage and Retention

When the local office receives documentation as part of the RAP-IS file management or client care, it should generally be uploaded in GCMS within the client’s RAP-IS file for reference. It is recommended that all documentation should be submitted electronically to the RAP office so that the documents are born digital and can continue to be retained digitally. If there are any instances where documents are received by the local office in paper copy format (either by mail or in person from SPOs, sponsors, or clients), and are required as part of the file or for decision-making, then the paper copies must be retained as originals, for the duration of the retention period, if not properly digitized. The original copy format is defined as the format in which it was first received at IRCC. If received by the local office in an electronic format (email), the email as well as the attached document should be stored electronically in GCMS within the client’s RAP-IS file, or in GCDOCS under the standardized naming convention protocol for RAP-IS.

Storage of physical documents can be done at the local office, or they may be shipped to IM-Operations to manage once the files are considered dormant, to alleviate space pressure at the local offices. If documents are being shipped to IM-Operations for storage, the accompanying listing of records should include all documents contained in the boxes. IM-Operations can provide further guidance on how to box and label these documents, if applicable.