Finance committee  I guess it all depends, doesn't it?

Finance committee  I'm not sure that I can give that evaluation. I don't know what percentage of tax is collected automatically by deductions at source, but for a huge portion of taxes, the agency itself doesn't have to make any real collection effort. Obviously they have to manage the money coming in, so they might have comparators with other national tax administrations to see how they do that, but we can't give that kind of information.

Finance committee  We have a financial audit every year that is in our performance report. We consider ourselves a bit of a professional organization. We had a peer review done of our financial audit practice, and I believe the report came out in 1999-2000. Excuse me, the first one on the financial audit was done by a private sector firm.

Finance committee  I don't think we noted anything that would require legislative change. The issue isn't the legislation or the laws. I think it is really a question of the management and the sophistication of the management of this. It's a very large sum of money. I think we all have to recognize that there will always be taxes owing; there will always be people who will not pay their taxes on time; and the amount is always going to be large, because of the volume of money they deal with.

Finance committee  We don't have that information. I don't know if the agency would.

Finance committee  I would suspect that at some point in time we'll go back, but it's not on the books for the immediate future.

Finance committee  The major issue we were raising in that audit was that they manage a very large sum of receivables. The amount, in and of itself, is always going to be large, because they're collecting, essentially, $1 billion a day. So any amount outstanding is going to be in the billions. What we were saying is that they aren't paying enough attention to which collection methods are the most efficient.

Finance committee  We looked at that audit in 1999. At that point, the agency had put quite an effort into the underground economy, if my memory is right. There had been a number of people brought in specifically to deal with that. I think our major conclusion was that it wasn't obvious to us. They weren't tracking the results, so it wasn't obvious whether those efforts were actually doing something.

Finance committee  We haven't done a follow-up on that audit.

Finance committee  We have indicated that at the present time our resource level is appropriate. We may go back, and we've indicated to Parliament--to the public accounts committee and to government--that we will have to reconsider our resourcing level after this year, because we were given new mandates.

Finance committee  We had planned, at the time, to do an audit of human resources management. They wanted to implement a management framework, but weren't very far along with its development. For example, neither the job descriptions nor competency profiles were completed. Nor was validation of the profiles.

Finance committee  Again, it's not an area where we have done any specific audit work. We hesitate to comment when we haven't actually done an audit. I guess all I can say is that in discussions they have certainly indicated the need or they're very aware of all the changes. I think they have tried to foresee some to the extent possible to change the systems as they can.

Finance committee  There's nothing that would indicate there would be a significant problem with it, based on past work that we have done and the competency of the people there. They've certainly always been able to respond to these measures. I would expect they would be able to do it again.

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  We do not assess the efficiency of programs, agencies, or administrations. We don't have this information, but perhaps the agency's annual report refers to this. I know that there is a sort of tax administrators' association comprised of members from a number of countries which meets on occasion, every year I think.