Finance committee  I will answer the question pertaining to the votes. The funding being sought today establishes a system. Regardless of which institutions are included, no additional costs will be incurred. We are building a system that can be adapted regardless of which institutions satisfy th

Finance committee  That is correct, Mr. Chair. I guess what I would say is that there is no way. I'm in no position to either confirm or deny that any taxpayer or any charity may or may not be under audit. Indeed, that is information that must be protected for taxpayer confidentiality. The fact tha

Finance committee  That specific measure I referred to would have increased the number of auditors by 186. That's correct.

Finance committee  Briefly, a voluntary disclosure program is a means for taxpayers to come forth and correct their tax affairs without being subject to the extra penalties associated with CRA finding them out and then assessing the amounts. From 2008-09 until today overall voluntary disclosures ar

Finance committee  If I may, from 2006, which is the figure we've been focusing on, we had 5,200 auditors and today we have 6,042 auditors. So the number of auditors has actually gone up, not down. Now we have implemented efficiency measures. Most recently, we had 186 managerial employees that were

Finance committee  It's a relatively new program that has had 1,500 phone calls and 170 written submissions, many of which are very promising and at the contracting stage. So this program appears to be meeting its intent.

Finance committee  We focus our efforts on two areas. The first is e-services. Depending on the service, about 70% to 80% of Canadian taxpayers currently use our online services. We've invested heavily in that component. The second revolves around reducing the administrative burden, in other word

Finance committee  We will use some of that money to step up our efforts in the construction industry. I don't want to single any companies out, but there are cheque cashing services such as Money Mart. There are also gift cards. And a lot of people use those methods to avoid paying taxes. This fun

Finance committee  Obviously, there is no need to perform a tax audit on an individual who does not file a return. It is simply a matter of identifying the individual and working with them so that they file a return.

Finance committee  That is a good question. I would like to get back to the committee with an accurate answer to that. I can tell you that we receive 30,000 complaints a year. The number of complaints has remained constant, but I am not sure whether the percentage of charity-related complaints ha

Finance committee  All of our efforts have been focused on those who provide services to the people in the underground economy, and we will continue to focus on that. The new dimension is that we'll be able to go after the other half of the equation, consumers who might be tempted by the undergroun

Finance committee  I think the IT investments are before the committee today. Those are the amounts, and then we use that to better target our audit efforts. Then we reallocate our existing resources, the 6,000 auditors I told you about earlier. So with the treaties, we have 91 treaties enforced to

Finance committee  That's correct. It also saves us from knocking on the doors of taxpayers who are otherwise compliant that we shouldn't be knocking on. Just a clarification though, FATCA isn't going to be in...it's not necessarily analogous in the sense that....

Finance committee  I think it goes back to the point raised by the other member regarding voluntary compliance. Our tax regime works through voluntary compliance with the collaboration of a lot of key stakeholders including the tax preparer community. We have begun discussions with the tax professi

Finance committee  Absolutely. As I mentioned in an earlier response, we're well over 70% in online filing for most types of returns. Those permitted certain efficiencies to the agency, but also efficiencies to taxpayers who receive their refunds in a very short timeframe. It also weeds out errors