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

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

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 indee

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 to that scale across the country.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. 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

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 would they initiate a criminal investigation? At that point, maybe they wou

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 eva

Finance committee  Sorry to interrupt, but those are joint investigations that we have with law enforcement or security commissions or joint investigations, but CRA criminal investigations always have on the book around 300 investigations of tax evasion, of which some could be in the real estate se

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 e

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

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

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 t

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 whi

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.