Public Accounts committee  It's new information in the sense that the risks grow and we pay more attention to it as people evolve. If you went back 10 or 15 years, you wouldn't see nearly the level of activity—

Public Accounts committee  The act designates certain goods and services that are not subject to tax. On this point, we discussed services provided by a person who is outside the country. There are rules pertaining to that, but I don't know in what specific section they're stated. I could find out and give you an answer.

Public Accounts committee  Okay.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. It's a general issue for us in the tax administration to make sure that people understand what they're doing, as much as possible, with a fairly complicated tax system. We do try to educate and do outreach, and this is another area. The typical tools we would use are to try to make sure that there is adequate material on our website that explains what the obligations are, and what some of the rules and parameters that might affect the taxpayer are.

Public Accounts committee  Perhaps I'll start with an answer to that, but I'll turn to Ted Gallivan, who's with me, on the specifics of individual organizations. As I said, concerning this unnamed person requirement, where we request information from a third party, we do have to go through a court process to be able to do that.

Public Accounts committee  I'll be very quick and just say that, yes, we obviously need to respect the legislative framework that we operate within, so we can only do what the legislation permits us. I would say, though, that with regard to third party data, the unidentified person requirement is something that we do have the authority to do.

Public Accounts committee  First, in reference to the tax gap, it is true that, more generally, we do studies that try to measure the tax gap, which is the gap between the taxes that would be paid if everything worked perfectly and the taxes that we actually collect. Obviously, it's a difficult calculation, but we do it, and we have a methodology that's well respected.

Public Accounts committee  I can jump in first, if that's okay.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the opportunity, Chair. On the question of getting large suppliers to register in Canada to collect and remit the tax, that's not something that's in the legislative framework now, so what we are doing in the absence of that is working to encourage people to know what they are supposed to do and to educate about the obligations under the tax act.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I will be making my presentation in English but will be pleased to answer your questions in French. Thank you for the opportunity to appear here to talk about the Auditor General's report on the taxation of e-commerce. I am joined by Ted Gallivan, our assistant commissioner of the compliance branch.

Finance committee  Thank you.

Finance committee  We do have awareness advertising budgets for certain things, whether we're trying to increase awareness of the benefits that we talked about earlier...and I believe the figure we have is about $6 million. I do have those figures, but not off the top of my head. It's six million dollars for 2018-19.

Finance committee  That was for general awareness of the benefits.

Finance committee  Unless any of my colleagues knows, I may have to get back to you on that, because I don't, off the top of my head, know what we do in terms of TV advertising on that.

Finance committee  I'm certainly happy to get back to you.