Again, I began on a very positive note, but in my writings I've been quite critical of the CRA, at least in the last 20 years, ramping up to 2013.
One of the problems was revealed in the Liechtenstein leak. That came from 2007, where there were over 100 Canadian taxpayers with undisclosed offshore accounts in this European tax haven. There was a six-year audit by the CRA of these taxpayers. At the end of the day, only two taxpayers were referred to prosecution by the crown, and the crown, the Department of Justice, decided not to prosecute anybody. Here we have an obvious disconnect between the investigators of a potential crime or an alleged offshore tax evasion crime, and the folks at justice who need to prosecute them. I think embedding the tax lawyers at an earlier stage in the investigation helps to work against that disconnect.
In other cases, we have FINTRAC, which is absolutely swamped with these suspicious-transaction reports. They get hundreds of thousands of them. Sometimes in the research community we call this a “drinking at the firehose” problem. They're just overwhelmed with information. It's not clear to me that they're particularly well coordinated with the CRA to pursue offshore tax cheats.
Finally, the RCMP, our federal police force, has virtually no resources at all to investigate white-collar crime. They're primarily looking at cigarette smuggling, often via Indian reserves. In terms of cross-border financial crime, that's clearly an important file. But we really don't have a federal police force that can assist the CRA abroad and within Canada in pursuing these criminals.