Mr. Chair, the CRA focus—and I believe it's an interest shared by most taxpayers—is early certainty. We see our income tax rulings and other functions as a kind of early warning area. For areas that are grey, where there's an ambiguous position or a desire for certainty on the part of the taxpayer, there can be a dialogue. We provide that almost from a service perspective.
However, that's also business intelligence. The agency has made using and mining business intelligence a huge priority. When we look at our rulings function, we don't just look at how quickly and how accurately we provide the rulings, but we also say this tells us what's on the mind of taxpayers. This tells us about the positions that may be at risk and about which we should be informing ourselves and understanding the full implications.
In terms of the four specific examples, I think that brings it up to a strategic level, where one of the objectives of the agency is to modify people's behaviour towards compliance. In each of the four cases, either through the legal system or through work in the Department of Finance, we found practices that we felt were non-compliant, and through a combination of interventions and tools, those practices are no longer occurring. From that perspective, we see it as a strategic success.
However, we also generate revenue: “revenue” is in the name of the agency. In this program, from 2006 to today, we've had roughly 8,600 audits yielding $5.6 billion in additional revenue. When you do the math on that, you're somewhere between $600,000 and $700,000 per file. When Canadians see the CRA pursuing some lower-income Canadians, there's often a lot of concern that CRA just picks on Canadians of modest income. In this space, when you crunch the numbers and you look at the number of audits we're doing and the dollar value, you can see that we're well north of $500,000 per audit on average.
Both from a strategic perspective in terms of curbing behaviour and also from a revenue generation perspective, we do have a track record of results, but as the OAG has pointed out, there are opportunities to improve.