Finance committee  No. Very often the chair and the minister will meet and they will exchange. Their official powers are in the act; the minister can give directives to the board and the board can give a recommendation to the minister. These powers have never been used in the five years. What the board is looking to is whether it's well managed or not.

Finance committee  The last one is the commissioner. The commissioner is responsible in the act for the day-to-day management of the agency, so I'm responsible and accountable directly by legislation for the day-to-day management of the agency. Mr. Baker would like to say something.

Finance committee  I'll try to speak and will be corrected by my people. We pride ourselves on being at the forefront of technology. Effectively, our technology branch is strong, about 3,600 people, which makes it the biggest one, I think, in the federal government. Although the fiscal year is not over--it will be three days from now--I think we will reach 53% for e-filing.

Finance committee  I'm not sure if we do it on a systematic basis throughout the country, but every time we have a project and we have options of locales for the centre, that's certainly a factor that enters into the decision. In fact, we made some decisions. We relocated one of the compensation centres to Winnipeg, for example.

Finance committee  Thank you. That's what I meant.

Finance committee  No, because, unfortunately, it's not as easy.... For example, if you visited our Winnipeg tax centre in May, you would see a very, very busy place. You'd have problems even walking in the halls there. If you visit the same centre in September, less than half the staff are working.

Finance committee  For example, the board gave itself charters for all the committees. It passed a resolution to participate in the performance assessment of the CEO and the COO. It is developing a major project tracking system, and it has an audit committee, of which I'm not a member, as management.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would have to ask for some help from my colleagues, because I don't have the technical background to answer the question.

Finance committee  Mr. Chairman, the question is very clear, but we don't have any technicians who could answer it. With your permission, I'd like to call on our colleagues from the Department of Finance in order to provide the committee with a quick answer.

Finance committee  I don't know. Jim, do we have that? When we do specific projects, we certainly take some of the things into account, but I don't know if we have that.

Finance committee  On the benefit, there is a huge saving for the taxpayers in the consolidating of this. There is also an efficiency saving. As I said earlier to the committee, all the growth of the agency has been financed through efficiency savings within the agency. We certainly hope that when we sign an agreement with a province and we collect either a harmonized sales tax or a corporate tax, provincial and federal, we can realize economies of scale there, and we benefit from that.

Finance committee  I think it would be focusing on our core capacities. I think the agency is always at risk. Because we are good at certain things, we're always at risk of spreading ourselves in all kinds of directions. We are good at collection and benefits administration in large volume or for the benefit of government clients.

Finance committee  Moving from deductions to credits, for example, creates a transition cost for a province, and the actual differential between the interest rate charged in Ontario and the interest rate the federal government might charge creates another difference. I don't know if you want to add more.

Finance committee  I'm not sure I understand.

Finance committee  I think the word—I'm not sure if I said it, and if I said it, I should not have said it—is to “compensate”. There is a differential. We collect penalties and we collect interest, and a certain amount of excess revenue comes to the federal government, but you're absolutely right, we pay the province what we assess.