Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Let's start with one of the premises, which was COVID. During COVID, my colleague Alex MacLean, who looks after international tax and large business, never stopped. They never downtooled those audits. We continued to focus on those taxpayers while giving six months of a kind of hiatus on contact for small businesses.
The CRA did suspend its small and medium-sized enterprise audits for a full six months, and when we resumed, we did so on a more consultative basis, checking in with businesses to see if we could start.
It would be my testimony today that during COVID the situation has actually been the the opposite of the testimony you would have received. The CRA never stopped its work on high-net-worth individuals and big companies through COVID. We made a deliberate pause because we understood that small businesses were suffering during COVID. When we resumed, we tried to make it a more consultative process based on the readiness of that business to withstand an audit.