Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for that question. Yes, as the commissioner of the agency, I get involved in this issue quite a bit, about what you can or can't say about specific individuals. I think it is important that we protect taxpayers' information that is provided to us, just as I

Public Accounts committee  Certainly, Mr. Chair. I will deal with it in two parts. The first part is about how we select things we might want to look into further. We have our own monitoring within the charities directorate of the charities that are out there, or we may uncover something that we want to i

Public Accounts committee  No, not that I am aware of. If there was a penalty or a sanction it would be on our website, although penalties, if I'm not mistaken, do get eliminated from the website after a period of time. People can still request them, but to my knowledge, there has been no sanction.

Public Accounts committee  I don't know if that is correct. I think you probably know better than I do—

Public Accounts committee  The donation under our rules as we administer the income tax has to come from the true donor. There's actually an interesting example that the team has raised with me. You might gather donations at a store near the cash register, and then the store submits them to us, but the t

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I'm probably not going to go too far into hypotheticals in this world, because often when you look at it, there's what the charity knows at the time and what the true facts are of the situation, so it probably would be unfair for me to speculate on that in this case.

Public Accounts committee  I will say, though, that to the extent that the case comes to our attention, we would look to the true donor.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. I'll perhaps turn to my colleague Geoff, but in the legal world, there's the question of giving the gift and how you treat that legally, and I think we draw our rules from that basis.

Public Accounts committee  Sharmila may be able to talk about the penalty. I would just note that people can give anonymous donations. There doesn't have to be a receipt with every donation. The receipt is valuable if you're going to claim the tax deduction.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the invitation to appear before you to discuss the role and responsibilities of the Canada Revenue Agency, or CRA, with respect to registered charities. You already introduced my team members. Given the many privileges it provides, registra

Public Accounts committee  I'll go first, and Cathy may correct me. As part of the legislation for the wage subsidy, the government committed to putting a registry out publicly that says who got the wage subsidy. We were in charge of putting together that list, and it was on the website. I assume it's st

Public Accounts committee  It probably was available. It took us a bit of time to get it, but, yes, it was essentially from the beginning of the program. What I'm not sure of is if it's still available today.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, because you may want quarterly, whether I think it's a good idea or not.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, I can say that definitively. Even though earlier on I talked about education, compliance and sensitivity to taxpayers in a situation, when we see something that's wrong, we go after it. We have to have that ability for strong enforcement in cases like those Cathy has raised

Public Accounts committee  I'm sorry. Between the two, I'm not sure I'm tracing together the actual question. Was it to do with SIN numbers...? It looks like my colleague got it.