Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon. I'm joined here today by Mr. Geoff Trueman, who is general director in the tax policy branch; Maude Lavoie, director of intergovernmental policy and evaluation and research; and Miodrag Jovanovic, the director of the personal income tax div

Public Accounts committee  I will begin by saying that every country makes its own choices with respect to this. Some countries provide additional data that Canada does not provide at the moment, and some don't provide some of the data that Canada provides. I think there is a variety of approaches, but I

Public Accounts committee  Part of our analytical framework is to look at alternatives to tax expenditures where appropriate. There are cases where it would not be appropriate, for example, where a tax expenditure relates to the accurate measurement of income for tax purposes. Quite clearly a direct spendi

Public Accounts committee  I understand. I believe the Auditor General selected eight tax-based expenditures and concluded that we evaluated four of them and didn't evaluate the other four. I guess our position is that, in effect, we did evaluate seven of those measures and we provided information in re

Public Accounts committee  Is this in terms of projections going forward of the cost of these expenditures? In fact, we used to do more projections and we found that there were some problems with the data and the methodology going forward. As I alluded to earlier, sometimes it's difficult to estimate with

Public Accounts committee  Yes. As I said in my opening remarks, I think we have a robust approach in both respects. We provide the information to Parliament and the public through the tax expenditures report. Having said that, we welcome the Auditor General's recommendations on improving that information

Public Accounts committee  I believe that takes a number of different strands. In terms of the tax expenditures report, every year we re-cost every single expenditure. That allows us to see if there are divergences from what we would expect, and then we look at those. So that's a monitoring approach. We a

Public Accounts committee  I think I'd respond by saying that when we analyze particular tax measures—and you referred to one and our work on flow-through shares and the mineral exploration tax credit—we apply a whole range of considerations. Firstly, what's the policy objective of the measure? What's the

Public Accounts committee  It's not clear specifically which measure you're referring to, but there are a suite of measures in the Income Tax Act that touch upon education, one of which was covered by the audit: the textbook tax credit. There's an education credit. The point made appears to be that these

Public Accounts committee  I would suggest that the objective of providing those measures will be to allow a better sense of how the tax expenditure will grow in importance over a few years. I think you can do that in many tax expenditures by looking at the four years of historical data and the two years

Public Accounts committee  I think there's always value in information. As I say, if I sound cautious, it's because we wouldn't want to give a false degree of assurance as to what those expenditures would be in particular cases where there's more volatility expected.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. We publish the tax expenditure report in line with the tabling of the main estimates every year. In preparation for that, we use the latest available data, which will vary from measure to measure. Whether it's a corporate measure or a GST measure, the data sources are differ

Public Accounts committee  The document referred to was an internal policy development paper that we prepared in looking at evolving the policy. It wasn't a document that we prepared for public release.

Public Accounts committee  As I say, it was prepared for an internal purpose, in terms of the policy development and the changes under consideration at the time.

Public Accounts committee  I think I said that it's part of our analytical framework. We have a kind of template that we use when we look at any tax measure, and part of that is looking at spending alternatives, alternative delivery mechanisms. I think there are exceptions where we don't get much further t