Thank you for being here this afternoon.
I'm just looking at the Auditor General's report. It says that between 2005 to 2015, there was an increase in income tax objections of around 171%.
My first question is: why? This is very high. This is not just a blip over the years. There has to be an underlying reason. Before we can address how to resolve it, we have to ask why.
Then I looked at paragraph 232, “Management of growing inventory”. It says:
The Appeals Branch of the Canada Revenue Agency had experienced steady growth in the number of taxpayer objections. Agency officials told us that the growth was a result of both the taxpayers' actions and the Agency's own efforts to identify and reassess taxpayers who were not paying their fair share of income tax.
All of a sudden, 10 years ago, taxpayers started to learn that they had these rights to object, and/or at the same time, in parallel, the CRA was doing a better job of identifying people's income tax. Is that the basis of the answer, or is there more to this?