Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. We have a number of different kinds of training, some on the technical side to ensure our auditors are up to speed on the latest developments in the tax world, but also some soft-skills training on dealing with taxpayers, conflict resolution, and that type

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the question. Indeed, in budget 2013 there were measures brought in to make it illegal to have zapper software. The agency has started a publicity campaign to advise people that there are substantial penalties. Unfortunately, I don't know the penalties

Finance committee  There are a number of measures that we take. We have various projects under way across the country. We risk assess the various areas of the economy that we would look at. We use information such as the Stats Canada report that talks about the growth of the underground economy and

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the question. The special enforcement program was an area that dealt with assessments coming out of illegal activities. The best example would be grow ops. It doesn't deal with organized crime. Organized crime and actions that come out of that are under

Finance committee  As my colleague pointed out, we change our systems obviously to try to do our work in a quicker, more efficient manner. One of our systems, a compliance system redesign, was and is the system our auditors use to get the information they need. Some of the changes that have been ma

Finance committee  That would be my branch, the compliance programs branch, because we also have the criminal investigations people who work there. We would make sure that in cases where we stumble across information that we would be sharing with the RCMP, it would be vetted through head office. We

Finance committee  We have a memorandum of understanding with the RCMP currently in place, and we're in the process of amending it. It deals with training, and who does what and how they can do it.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Chair. The voluntary disclosures program has existed for years within the agency. In a nutshell, it's a program that allows people who have not been fully compliant with their tax affairs to come forward, and as long as they pay the tax and the in

Finance committee  These are probably the reasons the VDP has been successful.

Finance committee  Yes. I don't have them à la portée de la main, but I can certainly provide the committee with the numbers. They have increased significantly in the last, I'll say, five years because of TIEAs, as I mentioned. It's only in the last five years or so that we've started negotiating

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, we can certainly provide the numbers. We do have them. We keep track of them, obviously, on a yearly basis. We can provide the committee with both the number of people who have come forward and the dollars involved with the VDPs.

Public Accounts committee  The question as to whether we can use stolen information is really quite relevant. In English, I would call that “the fruit of the poison tree”. I cannot answer that question today as far as Canada is concerned, because we still have not dealt with that type of situation. Howev

Public Accounts committee  At that time, yes, that is correct.

Public Accounts committee  That is correct. We work with our treaty partners. We have actually quite an extensive network of countries that we work with. So yes, we occasionally get lists from our treaty partners.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Briefly, in our tax informant program we have a number of measures in place to protect the confidentiality. It's pretty much a well-established principle in international law that you try to protect the identity of the informant for security reasons, so we