Public Accounts committee  Basically, Mr. Chair, they don't have the information of the written-off dollars or amount coming out of these compliance activities. The total amount they have is for the agency as a whole.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, we asked the agency to provide us with that breakdown specifically for compliance activities, and they were not able to provide us with that information.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, basically they indicated to us that they had approval from the Treasury Board and the finance department that the methodology they were using was accurate and good. We felt that using estimates to report back to Parliament would not be sufficient. In other words, they should consider other, more accurate measures to track additional revenues generated from the budgetary funding.

Public Accounts committee  Basically, as you pointed out, an individual taxpayer who's being challenged by the agency to provide additional information on a receipt is given 90 days to respond. If they don't really respond or provide that information, they're automatically disallowed—the receipt or the deduction—and they're reassessed, whereas when you look specifically at offshore transactions, again, they can make requests for additional time due in some cases to complexity—

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, they are set at the beginning of the year. They set the targets at the time of the—

Public Accounts committee  In paragraph 7.72 we made some observations and said it could be that the “taxpayers became much worse at complying with the Income Tax Act”, the “taxpayers were able to underpay their income taxes in 2013” if you compare it to 2017, or “the Agency’s risk assessment process improved”.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, we asked the question and they did not provide answer. I might even be in a position to say that they are withholding information.

Public Accounts committee  Basically, when we discuss this recommendation, we obtain their response specifically, and we challenge this response in order to make sure that the agency is in a position to address and take concrete actions to address the recommendations. They committed and agreed—as you pointed out—that they would identify or enhance their existing performance indicators to better measure and report their compliance activities, results and actual collected tax revenue.

Public Accounts committee  You have covered the topic by focusing more on the potential transfer of assets. The federal government often sells assets right now, whereas you have talked a lot about transferring assets today. The other aspect is the donation system, and I think that is included in our recommendations.

Public Accounts committee  I completely agree that that would move things forward and enable the departments to use other existing tools. It is a logical step in the right direction to achieving that purpose.

Public Accounts committee  As part of the audit, when we talk in paragraph 2.30 about the book value, those are the public accounts figures. Basically, we looked at specifically excluding assets that are controlled goods of National Defence and other movable assets, and the assets that are at play here are purchased for less than $10,000, so it's not necessarily going to be showing furniture in these figures.

Public Accounts committee  Maybe I should have specified that we have no specific concerns with respect to that. We are trying to depict here the whole of government in terms of what the net book value is and specifically the sale of these assets.

Public Accounts committee  Basically, the table was constructed with data coming from GCSurplus and GCTransfer. We wouldn't be in a position to provide information about what specific type of assets they are and if they relate to others. We requested each organization that was audited to come up with specific data on their transfers and the surplus assets that they sold.

Public Accounts committee  It could be chairs, as you say, or or boats, cars, vehicles, or any types of assets that the government has acquired to conduct its activities.

Public Accounts committee  When we conducted our audit, we looked at 50 files per department. As has been pointed out, it is the responsibility of the department to do the assessment of the method it's going to be using to dispose. It does a costing of the value of the asset, and if it reaches a point that to sell an asset is more costly than the return, then it has to find another way of disposing of it.