Mr. Chair, I'll comment on the two parts of that.
First, on the debt writeoffs, it is true that each year in the agency we have a certain number of tax debts that we have to write off. That can come from a number of different reasons. There can be bankruptcies. There can be people who are in financial hardship, where we defer, or in some cases we eliminate their tax liability. In some cases, we just aren't able to execute the collection of those activities.
We make every effort to do that. We have a detailed process, much like you might find in a bank or somewhere, on what to write off versus what to keep alive. At some point, we come to a decision that says it is not collectible and we're going to write it off. It doesn't mean that we couldn't come back at some point if new information became available, but we write it off in that year. We have a fairly transparent process—not talking about specific taxpayers, again, as I mentioned earlier—describing how much we write off in a particular year. Those writeoffs can come for a variety of reasons, and we just make sure that we have a good process to deal with them. That's one of your questions.
On the second question referring to the settlement, I guess I would just add a couple of things on that. Sometimes we may take a leap to say that there was a settlement as meaning there was no tax collected, and I just think that's the wrong interpretation.
I want to clarify that when we go in, in this particular case you're referring to, in front of a judge, we have a process that involves the Department of Justice to determine whether there is an outcome that is consistent with the law that we can agree to.
In that circumstance, confidentiality provisions preclude us from talking about it, and that is one thing on which we and the minister agree. The settlements are a necessary part of our activity, but we would like to have a more transparent process—