Public Accounts committee  In cases of straightforward civil assessments, it's the balance of evidence which applies. In that situation, there are several ways we can use to get the information we need. There would be information in the country, banking information which can be obtained in Canada and, if n

Public Accounts committee  If I may, I will answer that question in English. I apologize, but it is because I mostly work in English. There's a difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance. Tax avoidance is perfectly legal, and as the honourable member mentioned a few minutes ago, what is not prohibit

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. The TIEA with Liechtenstein was just recently signed. In fact, in 2007, when we received the Liechtenstein list, there were no TIEAs signed at that point.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, that is correct.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. The lessons learned—I talked a bit about it earlier—is that we now know how certain structures are set up. To put it in layman's terms, we know now where to look. It's as simple as that, and that helped us a lot in 2007 to get access to that informatio

Public Accounts committee  Yes, sir. The original five, yes.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would say the biggest change is that there are a number of countries...and I'll use one as an example, the Isle of Man, which was one of the first five countries that Canada negotiated with. The Isle of Man was considered a tax haven and they truly wanted

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I don't think the proliferation of banks really has that big an impact on this issue. It's more the tax intermediaries or the advisers who try to find ways to hide money in various places.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for the question. Actually, that is a very good point about what happened in the past. I would have to say that it's easy today, in 2014, to say that this happened and that happened, but if you take a step back.... I was lucky enough to be one of Canada's re

Public Accounts committee  That is an excellent question. Indeed, I often discuss results with my boss. Results vary from year to year according to the economic situation and the context. The 2013 budget, which I referred to earlier, has closed several tax loopholes. As the person in charge of audits, I a

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Chair. We have done a number of things. Ms. Jelmini talked about the wiki page, but we also sent instructions in January of this year to the people who are going to be working on the offshore front, talking about a number of measures: the time it

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  Penalties are always a very good deterrent, and the reason we say it's always on a case-by-case basis is that no two situations are identical. So we've always had a practice at the agency that we do not levy penalties unless we look at the facts of the situation.

Public Accounts committee  It's on taxes assessed and collected.