OTTAWA: Over the past six years, three different parliamentary budget officers mandated to report to parliament on matters of fiscal importance have requested federal data to calculate the difference between taxes due and those actually collected. The records required to find the figure — called the tax gap — never came.
Dozens of pages of correspondence between the parliamentary budget officers and Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) officials, obtained by a Toronto Star/CBC investigation, detail a five-year battle for data that has now concluded in a stalemate — and no information shared.
“It is disappointing,” says Jean-Denis Fréchette, Canada’s current parliamentary budget officer, sitting with a large stack of paper and folders in his Ottawa office, evidence of the five-year tug-of-war with the CRA. “It can go on and on and there’s no way out at one point, if you don’t have a full team of lawyers negotiating something with CRA.”
Eventually, the PBO “had to walk away” Fréchette said. “We had legal counsel, they had legal counsel. One said we should have access and the other said no . . . At some point you say, ‘Do we keep negotiating?’ ”
For more than 50 years, the U.S. has measured and publicly reported the country’s tax gap. The U.K. began doing the same in 2009, annually detailing the amount of taxes — from both domestic and offshore sources — that never make it into the country’s tax coffers.
In all, more than a dozen Western countries — including Australia, Sweden, Poland, Belgium, Portugal, Mexico and Denmark — measure their uncollected taxes in order to understand the size of their shortfalls and plot public policy strategies to address the problem.
