Hello. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be a witness. My name is Jason Ward. I'm the founder and principal analyst of CICTAR. I'm usually based in Australia, but I'm currently in Washington, D.C.
CICTAR is an organization that has been around for about seven years now. We specialize in detailed forensic analysis of multinational tax avoidance. Less than a month ago, on October 22, I was a witness before the ethics committee hearing and responded to numerous questions in relation to our extensive work over a number of years related to tax avoidance and the use of tax havens by Brookfield Corporation. I provided links for that committee to our previous research, which also includes several reports related to tax haven abuse by large Canadian public pension funds. I won't attempt to go through those reports, but the links have been provided to this committee as well.
Tax havens, as our previous witness stated, are a huge problem for Canada and globally. I'm going to try to focus on the solutions and not on the problem here, as I think many witnesses, previously and forthcoming, are going into details on the effects on Canada. I will cite one piece of research that was done by the global Tax Justice Network and released earlier this month, which I think was a very conservative estimate. It suggested that over a six-year period, from 2016 to 2021, $103.4 billion U.S. in profits were shifted out of Canada, resulting in a tax revenue loss of $27.3 billion U.S. That would be the equivalent to 3% of Canada's health budget. Again, almost half that estimate is related to U.S. multinational corporations.
Moving very quickly to the solution, the use of tax havens is not easy to find and is not readily disclosed by corporations, particularly those headquartered in Canada and the United States. It's very hard to fix a problem if you can't see it. Greater transparency is a crucial first step. We urge the Canadian government or opposition parties to immediately introduce legislation to implement full public country-by-country reporting for multinationals in Canada.
In Australia, public country-by-country legislation was passed in 2024. It now has the world's best reporting requirement for multinational corporations. We hope Canada can follow suit. Canada has the opportunity to go even further. In Australia, all multinationals with annual revenue of 10 million Australian dollars or over will be required to report basic financial information, including number of employees, profits, losses, taxes paid or not paid, in Australia and 40 jurisdictions around the world that are widely recognized as the most abused global tax havens.
The lobby groups representing the largest U.S. multinationals, also the world's largest tax dodgers, recently tried to persuade the Trump administration to threaten Australia over this simple transparency measure. I tell you this because it's an indication of how exposure of this information threatens the underlying business model of major U.S. corporations and other corporations that dodge taxes wherever and however they can, particularly with the abuse of tax havens and shifting profits offshore to where they are taxed not at all or taxed the least.
The European Union has also introduced a weaker version of public country-by-country reporting. Banks in the European Union have been doing public country-by-country reporting for a decade now with no impact on their competitiveness, with trackable increases in tax payments and revenues to governments, and with a declining use of tax havens.
We urge Canada to follow the Australian model and require this basic transparency measure so that government officials, lawmakers, investors and the general public can know which corporations are abusing the tax system, and where and how. Small businesses and responsible companies are at a huge competitive disadvantage if the world's largest corporations, many making record-level profits, can continue to avoid obligations to pay tax in Canada and around the world.
Tax authorities already get this data through confidential reporting through an OECD process; however, this information can't be shared and used for wider public purposes.
Making this basic financial data public also allows tax authorities to be held accountable and to make sure they are doing their job in collecting the revenue that should be paid by the world's largest companies.