Finance committee  I've explained it in total.

Finance committee  Okay. There are two points. One, under the intergovernmental agreement, we don't provide information to the IRS. We provide it to the Canada Revenue Agency. That's the first point. On the second point, bear in mind that, as I said earlier, this isn't about taxation. The tax lia

Finance committee  Well, unless for some reason they provided U.S. identification at the time they opened their account—and I don't know why they would have done that, or what that would have been—from the financial institution's point of view at that point in time, there's nothing there to suggest

Finance committee  Yes. From a financial institution's point of view, nobody wants to.... Everybody wants to make sure that you give.... If there's an indicator and it's unclear, certainly it's in everyone's interests to go back to the client and ask them, to say that there's an indicator on file a

Finance committee  That's right.

Finance committee  No, there shouldn't have to be any. That as well was in fact one of the big gains from the work that we had done, because if you went back to the FATCA legislation, in its regulations in the U.S., in its original incarnation, there would in fact have been a renewal process, where

Finance committee  Well, no, what I said was that if you have an account and there is no indication in your account file, based on the information already present, that you are a U.S. person, then there is no further obligation on the part of the institution to go through and look for additional in

Finance committee  I'm not fully following the question, but the way it works is that the obligation of the institution, in the case of pre-existing accounts, is to look at the accounts and the information the institution has on file. If there is nothing to suggest that the account holder is a U.S.

Finance committee  Are we significant players? Yes. Are we significant enough players to get the U.S. to change its mind? No.

Finance committee  Well, let me answer it this way. There are 33 OECD countries and 30 of them have taken a look at the same math we've looked at and come to the conclusion that it is the best course of action to engage to get an intergovernmental agreement—

Finance committee  Absolutely. From our perspective, the IGA allows us to void the application of FATCA. It gives us greater control. It allows us to provide information to the Canada Revenue Agency and then exchange it on a state-to-state basis, as opposed to trying to enforce a relationship to se

Finance committee  That's absolutely correct. It's about the exchange of tax information. It has nothing to do with the underlying tax liability. That comes from the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. tax code and has been in place for the better part of 100 years, as far as I know.

Finance committee  Yes, if you're a U.S. person, a U.S. citizen, who happens to be a Canadian citizen as well, you are then captured by the U.S. tax law. That is correct.

Finance committee  Absolutely.

Finance committee  Well, it's interesting. I've heard.... People have raised questions about the timing in all of this, and the process. From my perspective, actually, I view this as a relatively transparent and long process. The U.S. legislation came into place in 2010. The initial set of U.S. gui