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  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  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  At that time, yes, that is correct.

Public Accounts committee  That is correct. We work with our treaty partners. We have actually quite an extensive network of countries that we work with. So yes, we occasionally get lists from our treaty partners.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Briefly, in our tax informant program we have a number of measures in place to protect the confidentiality. It's pretty much a well-established principle in international law that you try to protect the identity of the informant for security reasons, so we

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  The question as to whether we can use stolen information is really quite relevant. In English, I would call that “the fruit of the poison tree”. I cannot answer that question today as far as Canada is concerned, because we still have not dealt with that type of situation. Howev

Finance committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Chair. The voluntary disclosures program has existed for years within the agency. In a nutshell, it's a program that allows people who have not been fully compliant with their tax affairs to come forward, and as long as they pay the tax and the in