Information & Ethics committee  No, this is information held by financial institutions. The type of information that would be collected would be the name, the bank account number, the address, and information related to income deposits. That's information the financial institution collects from their American

Information & Ethics committee  Protecting Canadians' personal information is really a process. The Privacy Commissioner confirms in his letters that meetings took place in December 2012, in August 2013, and in January 2014. Other unofficial discussions certainly took place before the document was produced. So

Information & Ethics committee  I’m sorry, but I am going to answer in English so that I don’t make any mistakes in my remarks. We conduct what's called a threat and risk assessment, which is a very technical information technology-driven document that looks at the specific IT systems encryption protocols that

Information & Ethics committee  In terms of the agreement, the exclusion of RRSPs, TFSAs, and those kinds of accounts from the exchange and limiting certain small deposit-only institutions was an important narrowing of the scope of the exchange. Also, the mechanics of the exchange in terms of the timing of when

Information & Ethics committee  Right. The intergovernmental agreement with the U.S. confirms that the information would only be used for tax administration purposes, so any use under the Patriot Act would be a breach of the agreement the U.S. signed with us.

Information & Ethics committee  The U.S. government agreed not to, and we have a long history of exchanging significant volumes of information with the U.S. government, and so I have no reason to doubt their word.

Information & Ethics committee  Just quickly in terms of context, data is being exchanged on the preceding tax years; in other words, in 2015 we shared tax data relating to 2014. The delay to September is to allow people to file their tax return, get it into the system, get it cleaned up. The banks need time as

Information & Ethics committee  What kind of breach? By the financial institutions or by the U.S.?

Information & Ethics committee  In the past Canada has had a treaty partner breach an agreement, and we cut off all future exchanges with that jurisdiction. I think in the global community, when a jurisdiction has that kind of serious breach, other jurisdictions respond by ceasing to exchange information until

Information & Ethics committee  From a tax authority perspective, exchange of information is becoming increasingly important and reciprocity is increasingly important, so at the G20 level, a direction is being given, coordinated by the OECD, for jurisdictions to share information. The most recent budget talke

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not aware of any breaches. What I'd underscore is that Canadian financial institutions have done a lot of work to administer this in an effective manner, so what is happening is that these institutions are reaching out to the CRA for clarification before the mistake happens.

Information & Ethics committee  The answer is yes, in terms of limiting the scope. For example, excluding TFSAs, RESPs, and the smaller financial institutions that may not have the capacity was important. I can assure the committee that senior-level intervention, one level below the commissioner, was necessa

Information & Ethics committee  We have established a formula, a kind of filter that determines what we accept. If it does not conform to the data in the filter, we do not accept it. It has to comply with that definition. We make sure of the identity of the financial institutions. We confirm that such and such

Information & Ethics committee  We believe that all the controls are in place. That is why we worked with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. It is why we have also established a process of feedback with the banks. It is hard to say that it cannot possibly happen. However, as the minister explain

Information & Ethics committee  I would add that it is not just the money that concerns the banks, there is also the burden of administering the withholding tax on all those funds. Basically, it is about the money, of course, but there is also a lot of work to do in making those deductions.