Finance committee  I'd have to confirm that, sir.

Finance committee  The policy emanates from that department, of course, but because the Canada Revenue Agency had administered the child tax benefit for a number of years, we were really off to a running start in terms of our ability to identify eligible families and children. We were therefore asked to implement this following last spring's budget.

Finance committee  Yes. Sometimes we launch projects that affect all the aboriginal communities throughout the country. We always try to find ways of addressing their needs. There are going to be many discussions with these community chiefs to identify the best way of administering these programs.

Finance committee  Very quickly, if I could add to this, we also have in place a number of quality review mechanisms whereby we'll go out and look at the activities and decisions made by different offices across the country. And if we detect an inconsistency, we will look at the right solution for that.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. If I might add to this, this is not an uncommon event. The CFIB does surveys of their members. In the process, we sit down with the CFIB—and we in fact have a meeting scheduled in the near future—to go through what they find out from their members and to look at the initiatives we have under way to see if they're going to reasonably address it.

Finance committee  I've seen that result as well; the number of hours has increased for small and medium-sized businesses. We haven't been provided by the CFIB, to my knowledge, with any breakdown of the causes for that, but I could suggest a couple of things. One is that there has been a tendency over the last while in the Revenue Agency to do what we call more full and complete audits of an organization, as opposed to just selective audits of certain issues.

Finance committee  I wanted to mention something that hasn't been mentioned: the authorities given to the Revenue Agency for human resources management. This place starts and ends with people. The authorities we now have allow us considerable latitude in the way we classify, in the way we structure ourselves, and in the way we treat employees.

Finance committee  I think the point is worth clarifying, and it relates to the earlier question as well. The tax collection agreements under which we administer the tax regimes for provinces, be it on corporate income tax or individual tax, are all treated the same way that way. The province does not have to pay for us to do that, because, as the commissioner has pointed out, there has been a longstanding view—and I think a correct one—that the public policy benefit of a single tax administration is so beneficial to individuals, businesses, and the central governments of the country that it's worth the price of administration to do that.

Finance committee  What you're raising is, of course, a matter of tax policy, which would be best directed to officials from the Department of Finance.

Finance committee  I don't know if there would be a particular obstacle. I can say that we administer, as you know, such a full range of federal and provincial tax and benefit and credit programs and so on that there is rarely anything new presented to us that we cannot accommodate.

Finance committee  I can't relate to the specific experience when we did the split on CPP, and I don't know if we have anybody here who can provide any detail. I certainly think, Mr. Chair, if there is some information regarding the cost to the agency, we could provide that to the committee.

Finance committee  At this point, we have now been collecting the GST for 16 years; as for income tax, the temporary tax goes back 90 years to 1917. I think it's fair to say after all those years, whether you're talking 16 or 90 years, that we have developed the systems and capacity and expertise to collect both taxes quite efficiently right now.

Finance committee  No. What I can tell you is that some of our international partners have self-assessing systems with value-added tax and income tax, and we tend to mark ourselves against that; we've attempted to benchmark our progress against them. It's been a very difficult thing, because every value-added tax in the world is different for various reasons and because of the interplay between the value-added tax and, say, the provincial tax systems--we have a harmonized sales tax, of course, in the three Atlantic provinces and in Quebec--so we really have not been able to derive meaningful indicators of our performance vis-à-vis other jurisdictions.

Finance committee  We're estimating the cost for the current fiscal year—and this is just the cost for conversion, notification, and all the systems changes—at $8.6 million. Then that virtually goes away, and in 2007-08 there's a residual cost of $1.3 million.

Finance committee  As you know, having been at the helm of this organization, little things are big because of the need to make sure that all of our system is lined up to reflect the proper amount of tax. That means all our forms and publications, whether electronic or physical, all the scripts we provide employees--everything.