CRA Considered Publishing List of Tax Cheaters: Report

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) headquarters Connaught Building in Ottawa on Aug. 17, 2020. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) in internal polling considered whether to make publicly available a blacklist of individuals who cheat on their taxes, according to a report.

“More than 1 in 3 Canadians, 35 percent, strongly agree the Canada Revenue Agency should publish a list of people found guilty of tax offences,” said a report titled “2022 CRA Annual Corporate Research Quantitative Phase” and obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter.

The report did not detail why the agency polled the question.

The CRA currently names individuals convicted of and jailed for committing tax fraud, but not Tax Court plaintiffs or other taxpayers penalized for evading taxes by hiding income.

The polling also found that about 51 percent of Canadians believe they pay too much in taxes compared to the services they receive from governments.

“Men tended to feel they paid significantly too much compared to women,” the report said. “Those with a high school, trade school or college education tended to feel they paid significantly too much.”

The report’s findings were based on questionnaires with close to 4,000 tax filers, tax preparers, and small-business bookkeepers and accountants across Canada. Most of the bookkeepers and accountants said tax cheating was very common.

“More than a quarter of small and medium-sized enterprise respondents, 28 percent, felt business tax cheating was quite common while 43 percent felt it was ‘moderately’ common,” said the report.

Legislation

The CRA’s internal polling on the matter comes several years after the House of Commons rejected a private Senate bill that aimed to require the agency to include a blacklist of convicted tax cheaters in its annual reporting.

Bill S-243, the short title of which was “Fairness for All Canadian Taxpayers Act (measuring the tax gap to fight international tax evasion),” passed the Senate unanimously in November 2018 before being voted down in the House less than a month later.

If it had passed, the bill would have amended the Canada Revenue Agency Act to require the CRA to “report on all convictions for tax evasion, including international tax evasion, and on the tax gap in the annual report it submits to the Minister of National Revenue for tabling in Parliament.”

The bill would also have required the Minister of National Revenue to provide tax-gap data every year to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

“I am sure that most parliamentarians would take very seriously the issue of tax evasion and would like to see increased measures to ensure accountability for the agency,” said Conservative MP Pat Kelly during the bill’s first reading in the House on Dec. 13, 2018.

“The Liberals have yet to do anything to tackle international tax evasion,” added then-NDP MP Pierre-Luc Dusseault.

National Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier responded by saying that the Liberal government had, at the time, invested “more than $1 billion in the fight against tax evasion.”

“We have done twice as many audits in three years as the Harper government did in 10 years,” she said.