Yes. I'm happy to respond to that, Mr. Chair.

You're right: It is a global issue. At the last meeting of this group that I chair, which is made up of the commissioners from basically all of the OECD countries, the number one topic on people's minds was the growing cybersecurity problem and fraud. Interestingly, one of the issues is that as all of the tax jurisdictions are trying to become more digitalized and faster in their service, we're actually opening the door a bit to allowing people to come and take advantage of that speed. That's a trade-off that we're all thinking about collectively.

What are we doing about it? We've done a few good things. We have instituted an automatic exchange of information whereby we're sharing information among ourselves about taxpayers in our jurisdictions so that if we see something that looks a bit funny, we can get that information from another jurisdiction. This is because, usually, when somebody is trying to evade or avoid taxes, they're doing it not just in Canada, but also in other places. We can exchange information to get a better handle on what's going on with some of these large, multinational groups, which can be hard to figure out just on your own. We're working together on that.

On the issue of financial crime, the minister mentioned that we had the J5, which is a group of five countries. It's made up of Australia, the U.K., Canada, the Netherlands and the U.S. They all get together—our tax and criminal enforcement groups—and that's good. It's good for us to share the best practices and what we are seeing because, again, something that's happening in one country is probably happening in another.

We've also created a separate little group, or a subgroup, that involves the large financial institutions and other experts in each of those countries. We can get together. Part of what makes us work well is our partnerships with financial institutions and others that aren't necessarily tax administrations to get a better feel for what's going on, and it's all necessary.

Fraud still happens. We're fighting it. We think we're doing lots of good things, but there are people who are very dedicated to committing fraud, and we have to make sure that we do everything on our side to try to stay ahead of them.

Transcript

Discussions (0)