I think the main challenge is the fact that all of these tax havens, at least to my knowledge, maintain bank secrecy laws. As a researcher, if I went to Switzerland, say, if I hopped on a plane and started to talk to either tax authorities or folks in banks, their answer would be, “If I reveal any information to you, I will go to jail. It's a criminal offence in my country to divulge personal financial information to any third parties.”
For that reason, we really have no idea how much is sitting in these tax havens around the world. Some studies have suggested that half is in one country, Switzerland. Sometimes in Canada we tend to focus on the Caribbean tax havens, but in fact they're relatively small players compared to some of the European havens.
Then, of course, Switzerland is a developed country with a very sophisticated financial sector. They did agree, for the first time in history, to share bank account information with U.S. authorities because of the UBS scandal. My understanding is that Canadian regulators also went and asked for information. They told us to go away. This was in part because the U.S. had conducted their Senate investigation that revealed this particular bank was sending people to the U.S. and they were pitching illegal tax evasion. Well, it turned out they had a Canada desk and they were doing the same thing here in Canada. Nevertheless, they refused to cooperate with us.
I should also highlight the fact that unlike Canadian banks, the Swiss government actually maintained, I believe, a 25% ownership in UBS at the time of all these scandals. So the government was a partner, in effect, with the banks. They subsequently divested their ownership interest in UBS. I'm not sure if they maintained interest in other banks. But because of the secret nature, because of these bank secrecy laws, nobody really has been able to estimate in any concrete fashion how much money is out there.