Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House this evening. I want to begin by congratulating my colleague on her appointment as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Revenue. I hope to have frank, honest, and unscripted discussions with her in the House, and that we will be able to exchange ideas and come up with solutions to the problems Canada has been trying to fix for some time, although they have gotten even worse lately and have been in the news, specifically, tax evasion, the use of tax havens, and aggressive tax avoidance.
Not so long ago, I asked the Minister of National Revenue a question about an extremely important file regarding the Swiss bank UBS. That bank made headlines a lot in the mid and late 2000s, and I also raised the issue with one of my colleagues.
What happened was that a whistleblower tipped off the U.S. government and other governments about a fraudulent scheme orchestrated by Swiss bank UBS and wealthy individuals including Canadians and Americans. Rich people around the world were hiding vast sums of money there to avoid paying taxes and grow their money. They were turning a profit with that money, which was invested all over the world but primarily in Switzerland. They did not declare those profits to Canadian or U.S. tax agencies.
It was similar to the KPMG scheme, which was discovered later. The U.S. meted out harsh penalties, but Canada was more lenient with the fraudsters. That is why the cases are similar if not exactly the same. The United States recovered millions of dollars in taxes from those rich American clients in addition to imposing very severe penalties on UBS totalling some $800 million U.S.
However, when the whistleblower gave the Canada Revenue Agency a list of names of Canadians who were involved in the scandal, nothing was done. The CRA turned a blind eye to those documents and later, in 2013, it finally received 3,000 voluntary disclosures from Canadians who decided themselves to report the amounts that they had hidden in previous years. That is how the government recovered approximately $270 million. However, the whistleblower said that Canada could have recovered up to a billion dollars since nearly $6 billion in assets were being held by UBS.
Why then is preferential treatment being given again, this time to UBS clients, when the Americans took the lead and cracked down on tax frauds and those who helped them, like banks and tax experts? Why is the government being so nice to fraudsters?