Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak this afternoon in response to my colleague from Sherbrooke, who is giving me the opportunity to tell him everything that the Canada Revenue Agency is doing to combat tax evasion and offshore tax avoidance.
The government is committed to maintaining a tax system that is open and fair for all Canadians. The CRA has a plan for enhancing its compliance activities through an unprecedented investment of $444 million announced in April 2016. This additional funding over five years will be used to equip CRA with more resources and tools to crack down on cheats and encourage compliance. Some of this additional funding will allow the agency to hire more tax experts to uncover more cases of tax evasion and tax avoidance.
Let us now move on to other measures. The CRA is setting up new teams to conduct audits of multinational corporations, wealthy, high-risk individuals and associated entities. These new teams will be made up of auditors, lawyers, economists, and experts, which will make the agency even better equipped to combat tax evasion and tax avoidance.
Since January 2015, the CRA has been collecting information on all international money transfers of over $10,000, including those from Panama, and it has selected the highest-risk individuals for review or audit.
The CRA is currently examining over 2,671 cases related to the Panama Papers and has identified 85 high-risk taxpayers so far who will be subject to a more thorough audit.
I will continue by describing some of the other measures that have been taken by the Canada Revenue Agency, which recently secured a court order requiring a bank to provide it with more information.
Multiple criminal investigations are underway, and search warrants were recently executed. The CRA will also deal with the information on the Bahamas that was recently presented by the journalist consortium. With regard to international tax evasion and avoidance, the CRA has a four-point plan to deal with non-compliance, which includes better access to information, greater focus on non-compliance abroad, additional resources to strengthen our capacity, and international co-operation.
With regard to international co-operation, the CRA has a number of tools at its disposal that allow it to stand in the way of anyone who is using or wants to use tax evasion or avoidance schemes abroad.