Public Accounts committee  Let me start on that one, and then I'll turn to my colleague. I think the first thing I'd like to say is that it's not that everything will wait until 2023. We're going to make progress, obviously, in the coming months and over the course of the next year, but some things will take longer.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I am pleased to be here to discuss the Canada Revenue Agency's action plan in relation to Report 7 of the Office of the Auditor General of Canada on the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy. With me today are the Assistant Commissioners of the agency, whom you have already introduced.

Public Accounts committee  I'm happy to go first, Madam Chair. In response to the question, what would say is that I don't have a particular recovery rate in mind at the moment. However, as the Auditor General has said, we also care very much about good use of public money. We will be looking to make sure the money went to the appropriate places.

Public Accounts committee  I think the one thing we need to keep in mind is that, as you say, a year has gone by, but we actually still don't have all of the information on whether somebody qualified or not. For example, the rules included that in the previous tax year or in the 12 months preceding 2020, you had to have earned $5,000 or met the requirements.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I don't have the specific number with me of how many repayments have been made. I know that we were clear with people about how they would repay if they needed to. We also told people that if they knew they had to repay, it would be easier to do it before the end of the 2020 calendar year for 2020 tax purposes, but I don't have an up-to-date number.

Public Accounts committee  There are two points that I would make. One, even before the pandemic we had experience with delivering benefits for the government such as the child benefit and the GST credit. It wasn't completely foreign territory to us. We have a very significant benefits delivery part and we deliver a number of provincial benefits as well.

Public Accounts committee  To put this in context, as I think everybody has mentioned, we put the system in place very quickly. It was simple and had probably fewer verifications than you would have normally, but we asked people to attest that they understood the rules of the program and that they were applying in good faith.

Public Accounts committee  I think essentially we would say that most Canadians were honest. While they may have made mistakes, they were honest about applying for these benefits. Nevertheless, there's always some degree of misappropriation or inappropriate benefits being received, and confusion. I'd be careful not to extrapolate too far the 11% who were eligible.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm very pleased to be here to discuss the Canada Revenue Agency's action plan stemming from the recommendations in report 6 of the Office of the Auditor General. You've already mentioned that I'm joined by three members, so I won't repeat that. In report 6 on the Canada emergency response benefit, the Auditor General noted that despite challenging circumstances, the CRA and ESDC quickly designed and launched an emergency benefit to support workers who lost income as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Public Accounts committee  I'll start. We have been doing quite a bit of work in this area, just to think about what cryptocurrencies mean for us in the tax compliance world. As with e-commerce, it's a growing industry, and we want to make sure that we're aware of how it can be used positively and where it could pose some challenges for us.

Public Accounts committee  You're correct that I don't know those numbers, but we'll do the best we can to get you those numbers.

Public Accounts committee  I would like to ask my colleague Mr. Gallivan to answer this question.

Public Accounts committee  This is one of the challenges we will have to meet by June 1. I can assure you that we have a good procedure for managing the system and making observations. However, as I said, it will be important to make commitments, consult others in the industry and learn lessons from other countries that have already done something similar.

Public Accounts committee  I would expect there would be some improvement in the tax gap as a result of these measures, but again, I think that may be more important in the future than right now, if this area grows. In the past when we've looked at this and the degree to which we thought there was a gap in this area, we saw it was smaller relative to the bigger tax gaps that we have in other areas.

Public Accounts committee  —but I think that as this grows in the future, we would hopefully see even greater benefits.