Finance committee   that are going to have to be incurred by Canadian and other foreign banks. So the jury's still out on FATCA.

Finance committee   of the penalties that are involved in disclosure and the uncertainty of the penalties, it creates a lot of stress. If you asked them about FATCA, they would say it's none of their business. These are legal Canadian citizens who have done nothing wrong. So how do you get that balance right? I

Finance committee   millions of dollars in penalties. That's the worst part of FATCA, I think.

Finance committee  I would like to hear what the other witnesses have to say about applying the FATCA multilaterally.

Finance committee  Mr. Chairman, my colleague, Darren Hannah, is really the expert on FATCA, so I'll let him answer.

Finance committee  Sure. Thanks for your question. I'm glad you raised it. We've been saying since day one on the FATCA issue that ultimately what this is, is an issue of state. It has to be addressed from a state-to-state level through information exchanged between states. You can't try

Finance committee  I would like to pick up on that before the other witnesses speak about the FATCA. I understand what you are telling me, however, currently, Canadian financial institutions are under the obligation of reporting this to the Canadian government. If we had multilateral agreements

Finance committee  I agree, but it has to be carefully implemented. Mr. Murphy, for instance, supported FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, out of the U.S. in 2010. This is actually a huge controversy, of course, in Canada, and there is a side agreement under way between the Canadian

Finance committee   automatic information exchange from tax havens to Canada. You can follow the precedence of the U.S.A. with its new FATCA—Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act—legislation and say that basically as a condition of your being able to bank in Canada, we will demand that if you operate branches

Finance committee  Thank you very much. Again, the information continues to be very valuable. I think very often we try to do too much. Focusing specifically on tax havens would probably be the way to go. So as we talk about different ways of just how things can be successful, clearly FATCA

Finance committee  I recognize that TIEAs are bilateral on request. FATCA, then, becomes an automatic one-way. So is the natural evolution not just a multilateral two-way?

Finance committee  FATCA is sort of a step in the right direction. It's not an agreement, of course, between governments, as we're suggesting should be in place, like the European savings tax directive...[Technical difficulty--Editor]...a requirement put upon foreign banks to have American account

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I certainly will open the floor, because I'm very interested, Mr. Cardamone, in what you have to say on FATCA.

Finance committee  All that FATCA has to do with is...[Technical difficulty--Editor]...holders in foreign banks, and those foreign banks have to report back to the United States Internal Revenue Service. It's multilateral in that any foreign bank that has American account holders in it has

Finance committee   FATCA, which is a statute that one could debate all morning and probably, from the U.S. point of view, a terrible idea and very offensive to other countries. But nevertheless, it had the effect of getting the world's attention. Information exchange is all for the good, but again, I