Finance committee  There's only one thing I would add, because you've heard a lot about the time delay. I would say that for this committee to do its due diligence, it should be finding out who has made comment on the various technical amendments. That way you'll see it has received good input. Tha

Finance committee  There are 82,000.

Finance committee  The comfort letters, as we've said, are an important element, but the timeliness is an issue, yes.

Finance committee  I'm an accountant—a chartered accountant, by the way.

Finance committee  Soon to be a chartered professional accountant.

Finance committee  Yes. The process would be that I've identified a technical concern. I would call the Department of Finance and say, this doesn't make sense because the rules shouldn't work the way they're working. The Department of Finance considers it and they say, you've identified a problem a

Finance committee  I can't give you a typical timeframe. Are you talking about the discussion and talking?

Finance committee  Exactly.

Finance committee  I don't know all of its members, but the head of it is actually a chartered accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. This person is a former tax practitioner, an experienced person who's able to understand and comment on technical tax legislati

Finance committee  I would just add that I think until the government makes a real commitment and does something towards it, we can talk about it until the cows come home and nothing will happen. I do believe you can make some changes. I've spent 34 years working with this act, and there are area

Finance committee  The joint committee is probably one of the biggest contributors to the whole process. Since the middle of 2003, the joint committee has made over 70 submissions, some of them being hugely complicated submissions. So generally speaking, the answer is yes. The only criticism we ev

Finance committee  We all talk about simplifying the tax act, but there are so many competing interests that a simplification to one person is taking somebody else's advantage away. You have a huge number of competing issues. I think simplification requires a two-part process. One is to try to see

Finance committee  As you heard from the previous panel, which included Finance, yes, some people do and some people don't. In fact, this has been one of the issues, that it creates uncertainty. In fact, in some cases there are business transactions that don't get done because of the uncertainty. I

Finance committee  Yes. You've heard the suggestion that this may lead somebody to do aggressive tax planning, and that's for sure, but I would say that in my personal experience, more often than not it's not about more aggressive tax planning; it's about people who often can't do transactions beca

Finance committee  Absolutely. I'm not sure how you can measure the actual impact, but there's just no doubt about it.