Finance committee  You have to realize that the vast majority of income tax is deducted at source. Those are payments that come in with essentially no collection effort. We can try to find the numbers on how much is not actually deducted at source, but it's a relatively low amount. Also, generally in Canada I think the compliance rates tend to be pretty good compared with those in other countries.

Finance committee  What happens is that the Canada Revenue Agency collects the money and remits 100% to the province--fairly quickly, actually, through advances--and then there is a settlement once we have completed our audit of the statement. The agency will collect any interest and penalties owing on that, but it also assumes any writeoffs that have to occur.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  That's right. But if there is a loss--for example, if the $1,000 isn't paid by that individual because the individual goes bankrupt or whatever—the agency assumes that loss.

Finance committee  As Jamie was saying, the longer they wait, the harder it is to collect, so the risk of losing it goes up. And I'm sure that the Department of Finance wants to have something to say about the cash in and cash out.

Finance committee  That means that they collect about an equivalent amount.

Finance committee  I'm not sure. We can check.

Finance committee  It's $11 billion.

Finance committee  No, it is gross.

Finance committee  That's right. It's accumulated over a number of years.

Finance committee  I'll ask Mr. Hood to answer that.

Finance committee  By the net unresolved money, do you mean the $18 billion?

Finance committee  No. That would really be getting into an evaluation, which is work that we don't do. We only look to see if the agency itself has done that kind of evaluation work if we feel, in our audits, that it's warranted.

Finance committee  As I said before, we are planning to do this audit of the human resource system, and some of the questions raised certainly relate to that. I could perhaps suggest to the committee that if, during the course of the hearings or otherwise, you have concerns about human resource management practices and you would like to suggest that we look at them as part of the audit, we would certainly be glad to consider that, because we haven't really looked at issues like training or movement of people within the organization yet, but those are potential areas, obviously, for audit going forward.

Finance committee  In the tax debt audit we did note that the amount of money owing to the government had increased faster than total taxes. So it isn't simply a growth factor. We would have expected the agency to be able to explain why that was, and they weren't able, so again it comes back to their ability to have good information and analysis of what is happening with this tax debt.