Finance committee  I will not be able to answer the question in the way you anticipate, Mr. Chair. Our audit system and our collection system are independent of each other, and as a result, once an audit has been completed and the amount is identified as outstanding, it is attached to that taxpay

Finance committee  If you look at the agency as a whole, Mr. Chair, well over 90% of tax debt identified by the Canada Revenue Agency is paid within one year of being identified. By analogy, you can assume that once our debt is identified, the vast majority of that will be paid within the year, sub

Finance committee  Certainly, Mr. Chair. Once we identify, from an international aggressive tax standpoint, that certain schemes could affect Canadian taxpayers, we look at those schemes and identify particular points that we think are relevant for our audit community to look at when they're doing

Finance committee  Certainly from the agency's approach, we move forward in terms of detecting, addressing, and dealing with these issues. To that extent, we deal quite extensively with the OECD and the various working parties involved in that group to share best practices and to incorporate those

Finance committee  There are many facets, Mr. Chair, to your question. With respect to identifying aggressive international tax planning to the public, one of the major approaches that we're following is to identify to the public situations where we find aggressive international tax planning throug

Finance committee  We work extensively with the OECD, which has 46 countries at the Forum on Tax Administration, and we also deal personally with countries that are fairly well associated with us in being very mature tax administrations, such as Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, I prefer to say sharing best practices, because we are also a provider of best practices to other countries.

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, that is correct. We did investigate carefully every name on the list. It was determined that several of the taxpayers had in fact reported and paid their tax. There were a couple of members on the list who were deceased. There were several names on the list where we

Finance committee  Certainly. Mr. Chair, we're always looking to ensure that our programs are operating efficiently. Our branch organized an evaluation study by our internal audit and evaluations group to look at our criminal investigations program, which had several component parts. At the end o

Finance committee  We're certainly hopeful that we're on the right track, and I believe we are on the right track. When you look at the exchange agreements and the treaties that are in place, when you look at the new reporting requirements that Mr. Ernewein has talked about and our capacity to use

Finance committee  In a very basic sense, transfer pricing is a very important part of the work that all tax administrations have to do, because the economy is becoming global and taxpayers are working internationally all the time. As a result of that, when you have organizations and structures whe

Finance committee  It's across the board. It's large corporations, it's multinationals, it's small corporations. Any time there is a transaction across the border involving a related second party, it's possible now.

Finance committee  That project is virtually complete now. You're correct in identifying the 106 names on that list. We have gone through the list and we have conducted 47 audits and identified $22.4 million in outstanding tax from a base of approximately $100 million in raw assets. From that, we a

Finance committee  I'm not aware of any research on that, but as the tax rate goes down for corporations, for example, within Canada one could suspect that there would be less energy that would have to go into moving assets offshore. But again, I don't have any particular information on that.

Finance committee  I'm not aware of any recognizable standard that compares one country to another. One of the challenges we face is that each country will define how it identifies its results independently, so there's no standard upon which we can make sure, to use the phrase, “apples to apples” a