Finance committee  I'll answer part, and Ted Gallivan can complement the answer. I'm asserting that we've been more and more successful in tightening the noose around offshore tax avoidance and tax evasion. What is a way of measuring that? Well, when people come forward under the voluntary discl

Finance committee  Yes, sir, we do provide rulings. It's a significant part of the responsibility of the Revenue Agency whereby we're asked to provide a ruling. It's an important part of our responsibilities.

Finance committee  First, on complexity, any commissioner of a revenue agency would prefer to have a tax system that would be simple, that would be clear, and that would reduce compliance efforts. All Canadians would welcome that. I feel a little torn, to be honest. I think that is a good outcome

Finance committee  On the first part, the reference to 6,000-plus auditors, that is the number of auditors we have today. That's over the period of fiscal restraint. The indication I had is that we were still able to grow our auditor complement by 20%. Going forward, following budget 2016 and a $4

Finance committee  The minister announced the government's approach to tax gap. She announced it on April 11. It will be a series of things as opposed to one big bang. What she committed us first to was a conceptual paper on the definition of tax gap, on approaches to measurement, on the methodolog

Finance committee  In broad strokes, CRA could never leave the Connaught Building if we were worried about coming into interaction with a taxpayer or a taxpayer's representative with whom we had issues. There are 100,000 appeals a year and 5,000 litigation cases. It's our conduct, not our attendanc

Finance committee  I think this question has been asked and answered by me and by legal counsel. We're unable by section 241 of the Income Tax Act to enter into that kind of discussion.

Finance committee  I sent no letter.

Finance committee  Perhaps you mean a representative of Canada Revenue Agency rather than me, but I'll ask Ms. Lovett again to talk about the legal restrictions that bind all Revenue Agency employees.

Finance committee  I apologize if my response seemed that way. I'm very pleased to see the interest of the committee in issues of tax administration, and in particular in what is a genuine issue of great concern: international tax evasion and avoidance. I am extremely proud of the employees of th

Finance committee  On the first question, and I'll try to be very brief, we have increasingly taken a very different approach to small and medium-sized enterprises from large international global enterprises. Increasingly, you are seeing far fewer deployments of audits with small business. Also, yo

Finance committee  I'll ask Diane, but I want to put some numbers here in context. I think it's important for the public record. There was a media report focusing on former CRA employees who went to work for the Big Four firms. In that report, 21 former CRA employees were identified by name. The m

Finance committee  We put out a contract. A number of names were developed within the agency of people who had considerable expertise in tax law, people of good reputation, and then those who were available in the timelines we had. Ms. Brooks was either at the top of the list, or close. She was con

Finance committee  Earlier on I spoke about the broad numbers. I spoke of 5,000 cases in litigation. I spoke about the cases that go to court, about 2,200. Of those where a settlement is reached, it is about 3,000. On prosecutions, we haven't touched upon what's an important distinction between in

Finance committee  Sir, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by “tax record”.