Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the member for St. Albert. He talked about the issue of confidentiality in the income tax system. This is a very important issue. It was touched on by virtue of the auditor general's investigation in this matter.
For those people who do not know, our system is based on a certain integrity of the system. Information that is given to Revenue Canada is basically confidential. In other words, if any one of us here submitted our income tax return to Revenue Canada, we would not anticipate that another person could get that information and use it for whatever purpose.
I would be interested to know the comments of the member because I know he has some experience in the area of accounting and possibly auditing.
When we choose an audit sample, the idea is to get a sampling of what is going on in a department or a typical population base, but we must be certain when we direct this at something as sensitive as Revenue Canada that the population base is basically large. In other words, we want to know as a general rule how certain procedures of Revenue Canada are undertaken. It is incumbent on the auditor general to respect the confidentiality of the system in choosing that audit sample.
In reading the report of the auditor general, I was somewhat chagrined to discover that the audit sample represented only one or two cases. The problem with that is that when there are only one or two cases, after a while when we start describing what the cases are like, it becomes very easy for somebody in the general public to identify the taxpayer.
The finance committee was really addressing the issue of whether the bases of the audit sample were such that the auditor general contravened the intent of Revenue Canada to have confidentiality. For instance, if he did the same thing with one of us, if he said it was a member of Parliament who comes from St. Albert, by the time he was through defining a sample, we would all know who it was.
Could the member address the very important issue of confidentiality in taxpayer information?