Thank you.
Thank you to the Auditor General for this report and to the commissioner and deputy commissioner for appearing here to answer our questions. Indeed, thank you to all of you for your service to Canadians.
There are a lot of troubling elements in this report. There are many things that I think many Canadians would be quite rightly concerned about. I want to focus first on one that I think many Canadian taxpayers would find very troubling. This is the discrepancy in time allowed for compliance for the production of documents. It's the discrepancy between what's categorized in the report as individual Canadians, people who are filing a T1 general on behalf of themselves, versus other categories of tax filers.
I think I'll go straight to you, Mr. Hamilton. I'd like you to explain why an individual Canadian gets 90 days to produce a document, and if they fail to produce it, immediately has their benefit or credit, as the case may be, struck, yet other categories of tax filers—including, it would appear, any with offshore transactions—are given additional time.
This report states “Sometimes, the Agency did not obtain information at all, and the file was closed without any taxes assessed.” Please explain.