Thank you.
Thank you for your presentations. I'll skip the Auditor General. She has a report in front of us. She spoke to it in her remarks. It's not out of disrespect; I just want to get right to the nub of the issue, which appears to have been missed by the witnesses from CRA—totally missed, and I'm really surprised.
I appreciate that you have only been in your job three weeks, but your colleagues have been there a lot longer. The issue is not deposits for overpayment risk. Of course, there will be deposits; there can be $25 billion in deposits. The question is how much interest CRA pays on those deposits. Apparently, you've syphoned out about $30 million in each of the last three fiscal years that didn't have to be paid, because the amount of interest you're paying exceeds what's being paid out on the street, exceeds what these corporations could get if they placed the money on deposit somewhere, and exceeds the amount of money you would have to pay in interest to borrow the money.
So the taxpayer is getting really skinned here, and I don't understand whether you can figure out whose money you're putzing out the back door. You haven't addressed the interest rate that CRA pays on the deposits, and I want you to do that. I want to know why you haven't altered the interest rate.
And answer this question while you're answering the big one. You're not bound by a statutory rate of interest here. I understand that CRA voluntarily began to pay interest on these deposits; that's outlined in the Auditor General's report. Please get to the issue of why you're paying 5% to 7% interest on overpayment risk advance deposits. Please just tell me that.