There haven't been any funding cuts. The budget is stable.
It turns out that the agency made the strategic choice in 2013 to reduce the number of offices and to focus on highly sophisticated schemes, overseas schemes and the practices of financial professionals, and to no longer go after convenience store owners or the average person. We are targeting more serious cases of non-compliance. For that, we needed auditors with more experience and more skills, which is more expensive. So with the same budget, we now have a smaller number of investigators, but they have much more experience.
This same strategic decision explains the drop in the number of cases. We went from one or two files overseas to 40. These files are much more complex, so we assign many more auditors to them. There are exchanges at the international level.
For the criminal investigations program, we chose to have fewer auditors, but they are more experienced, and we are focusing on more sophisticated files.
This doesn't mean that we are moving away from other areas of non-compliance, but we are taking a civil audit approach with them. If the owner of a convenience store sells lottery tickets but doesn't pay the tax, we ask the owner to pay the tax, but we no longer initiate criminal proceedings in this situation. We are pursuing people who have very sophisticated accounting strategies.