As I'm searching my iPad to look at Australia's situation, I see an article here by a Mr. Richard Highfield. He's a senior adviser with the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, and he's an adjunct professor at the Australian School of Business. In this piece, it says he “argues reporting and matching information about incomes and tax paid are proven and 'highly effective' means of detecting and deterring non-compliance by taxpayers”.
He goes on to say later that, “Estimating the size and composition of the aggregate tax gap in Australia with any degree of precision is difficult because of the complexity of the tax system and the numbers of taxpayers involved”.
And he goes on to talk about the fact that they don't actually look at the situation like other countries because they're having a hard time estimating it. Again, there are a number of reports; I just picked the first one. This is not a good use of taxpayer funds. Australia has had, obviously, huge problems in trying to estimate their own, so again I think our resources are better, as Mr. Highfield says, trying to actually match the reporting with the information that we're collecting, which is what the CRA has been doing and we've advanced significantly since the previous Liberal government.
Thank you.