Finance committee  I just want to talk...

Finance committee  Your question assumes I have a magic wand and can dictate the course of our criminal investigations. That ultimately depends on the evidence.

Finance committee  That's a very pointed question. There are two elements. First, we've already established the identities of all the clients. There has been a lack of cooperation by some of the individuals identified, but the audit is under way. The audit process is still under way due to the com

Finance committee  I'd also come back to this question of discretion. The act provides the minister to exercise discretion, and she delegates it to officials. I think in the past, we were processing these requests without exercising that discretion and looking to put the taxpayer at the centre of i

Finance committee  I'm going to raise two points in response to your question. First of all, at the time of the OAG's audit, we hadn't considered the possibility of offering relief to ordinary taxpayers selected by computer for audit where the agency was responsible for processing delays. In our e

Finance committee  The association that represents professional accountants in Canada has a code of ethics. That document has just been updated. The code is included in the basic training given to accountants. It's a focal point in continuing training. We also have the option of imposing administr

Finance committee  Consistent with some of their remarks we've had today, we think that, for regular taxpayers who make a mistake—or there could be a spouse who passes away, and the other spouse wasn't aware of what was taking place financially—we wanted to keep that open. Those regular Canadians c

Finance committee  The OAG, going back to exhibit 7.2, confirms that we were more than $3 billion ahead of plan. In other words, the expectation was that we would be at $8.2 billion, and we're $3.4 billion or $3.6 billion better than that. The concern is thus not whether we are meeting or exceedi

Finance committee  Definitely we need to do better. I'll just start with some context, though. The branch I lead, international large business, is about $8 billion of the annual lead, from about 5,000 audits. It's a very small focus. Regular Canadians, the T4 filers we talk about, account for abou

Finance committee  You asked a question about convictions. I think that can be explained in large part by the fact that you have to wait for the right time. In 2012, the agency decided to focus on more delicate cases. I'm not talking about cases involving offshore activities, but rather more seriou

Finance committee  It's not zero.

Finance committee  The figures that show the direction we've asked our criminal investigation teams to take are readily apparent from our caseload: one third of our cases involve offshore activities. We agree this should be a priority. We've made it a priority. However, you're right: we don't have

Finance committee  Once again...

Finance committee  First, we don't clearly define what does or doesn't constitute an offshore activity. So I don't want to play with figures and say it's six, for example, and then have you tell me instead that it's four. Let's agree that a lot of investigations are under way but that there haven't

Finance committee  We totally understand that, when a human auditor is assigned to your file, there's a greater likelihood of an agency delay. We proactively consider taxpayer relief in those cases. When it's a more automated interaction, like a system generated letter, we hadn't turned our mind to