Finance committee  Briefly, I agree with Mr. Murphy that enhanced multilateral sharing is a good idea. Maybe it could be tied into these bilateral TIEAs in some fashion. I also agree with him to move the agenda forward, that to simply disclose the identity of the account holder and not their inco

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  That's correct. Canada actually signed the agreement in 2004, and as I mentioned in the previous hearing, for a bunch of strange political reasons I think the government intended to ratify this agreement, but the implementing legislation simply hasn't passed through. The reason

Finance committee  Yes. As a first point, we would call all of those moneys you mentioned with respect to foreign investments in Barbados and the Caymans perfectly legitimate. Those are moneys fully disclosed to our government. That's the multinationals, involved in aggressive transfer pricing and

Finance committee  You would hate to give up on the traditional justice system, but it's my understanding that we haven't had a successful criminal prosecution for tax evasion in Canada in the last decade. I would defer to the CRA and Finance experts on that issue, but we haven't been able to succe

Finance committee  Are you referring to tax evasion or tax avoidance?

Finance committee  Obviously, there is the criminal element: folks laundering money, using the conventional financial system to clean up moneys derived, let's say, from the illicit sale of narcotics. Then you may have the business person who has stashed away cash in millions of dollars. Because o

Finance committee  I don't know the answer offhand. I just suggested that from my understanding a much greater problem would be the domestic non-compliance tax gap, not the international one.

Finance committee  I don't know the answer offhand. As Mr. Murphy indicated, some countries, for whatever cultural, historical, or political reason, such as Italy, Spain, Russia, and Mexico—I hope nobody has heritage in these areas. There is a lot of non-compliance even though in certain of those c

Finance committee  Oh, okay. Yes, I agree that there's insufficient prosecution, especially for offshore tax evasion. It's very tough with the mens rea, the guilty mind requirement. I don't think our CRA has been easy on multinationals. If anything, the audit rate is higher for the businesses, a

Finance committee  It hasn't been implemented yet. I think the implementation date was delayed until January 1, 2014. I think the joint committee estimated it will raise $8 billion, which isn't really a whole lot of revenue considering the global spread of this new law and the compliance costs that

Finance committee  It's a very difficult problem. I hear from these folks all the time who are law-abiding Canadians. Some are so-called accidental Americans; maybe their parents were there on vacation. Anyhow they don't owe any U.S. taxes, but they may owe hundreds of thousands or potentially mill

Finance committee  Transfer pricing, of course, is a very complex issue. Just out of interest, I'll mention that here in the U.S. they had a similar transfer pricing case against Glaxo—a very similar structure with the Swiss affiliate and Zantac, and so on—and Glaxo settled this matter and paid the

Finance committee  We're dealing with the issue of international tax avoidance and the usage of tax havens. This is a very tough problem. As I mentioned, the Canadian tax laws have a multitude of provisions that subsidize, effectively, international income. We don't give a break normally to the dom

Finance committee  Currently, as mentioned, they operate more or less as a conduit. Take Barbados as an example. We've had a treaty with Barbados since I think 1981. It's our third-largest destination for foreign direct investment going abroad. This is a wonderful country of about 300,000 people. I