Finance committee  I do not think that the tax information sharing agreements hinder our work. On the contrary, I think that there is a lot to be gained in signing new agreements with as many countries as possible. In 2018-19, a new Common Reporting Standard for the automatic exchange of financial account information will come into effect.

Finance committee  I think the process works very well. As for the civil cases processed by the Canada Revenue Agency, internal auditors will sometimes send on dossiers to those who are responsible for investigations. When there are a sufficient number of offence indicators in a case, the auditors submit the case to the Criminal Investigation Program personnel, who accept it and conduct an in-depth investigation before sending it to the Public Prosecution Service of Canada.

Finance committee  Yes, we are working in several joint investigations, whether it be money laundering or when there is a tax-evasion element. I think it has already been confirmed in the media in British Columbia that CRA is part of an RCMP investigation that was made public, so, yes, we are indeed aware and we are working collaboratively with the RCMP on those cases.

Finance committee  I would say that money laundering has no boundaries.

Finance committee  The CRA is involved in several criminal investigations that relate to money laundering on that scale across the country.

Finance committee  CRA always starts with the confidentiality provision of the Income Tax Act. We always see section 241 of the Income Tax Act as some kind of bubble that every employee who gets into CRA defers to. The briefing they have is don't share information, but there are always ways whereby we can share information.

Finance committee  For CRA, similarly we get engaged only when there's a suspicion of tax evasion. I think it's the role of the local police, law enforcement, to make a determination if there is mortgage fraud going on, and whether they initiate a criminal investigation. At that point, maybe they would like to call in the CRA to say, “Would you like to have a joint investigation?”

Finance committee  That happens pretty frequently. Currently, we have, I would say, 13 joint investigations that we have with law enforcement, and that would be the RCMP and others, but it would not be specifically on real estate, but joint investigations on large-scale money laundering and tax evasion cases.

Finance committee  Those are joint investigations that we have with law enforcement or security commissions. CRA criminal investigations always have around 300 investigations of tax evasion on the books, of which some could be in the real estate sector.

Finance committee  There was a lot of investment put into CRA systems and business intelligence. Considering that almost 89% of Canadians now file electronically, CRA had to step up and organize its system to ensure that what we have in our system can generate more cases or more indicators of tax evasion that will make their way eventually to the criminal investigations program.

Finance committee  This lack of transparency is a real problem, I can't deny it. Over the years, however, Canada has, together with various countries, concluded 93 tax treaties. In addition, we concluded 23 agreements on the sharing of tax information with various countries, some of which are known tax havens.

Finance committee  First, the business transformation was essential. I was looking yesterday, and almost six years ago to the day there was a committee appearance to review the PCMLTFA, and a former colleague, who has since retired, was here, and I think at that point it was made clear that CRA had to renew its criminal investigations program, and this is what we did.

Finance committee  First, it would be helpful to distinguish between CRA audits and investigations. Today, I am here to talk about investigations. According to the guidelines we received, myself as director of criminal investigations included, we have to conclude our investigations and send them to the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, the PPSC, so that it can eventually launch suits.

Finance committee  If I understood correctly, there are currently 990 ongoing audits of Canadian taxpayers who have money abroad. For the cases specifically linked to the Panama Papers, there were 150 audits ongoing as of December 31. We also carried out several criminal investigations, some of which led to searches a few weeks ago.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. The absence of public registries listing ultimate beneficiaries or real owners does hinder our investigations, of course. However, I believe the provincial ministers of Finance have agreed on the development of a framework likely to lead to solutions.