The federal government’s offshore tax evasion whistleblower program continues to gain popularity as the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has received 2,984 calls to its hotline, with 812 of those calls from potential informants, as of April 30.
“There seems to be an ongoing influx of calls,” said Phil Kohnen, manager of the trusts section in the income tax rulings directorate with the CRA, during the agency’s roundtable session at the Canadian chapter of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners’ (a.k.a. STEP Canada) 2016 national conference in Toronto on Friday.
The Offshore Tax Informant Program (OTIP), which launched in January 2014, offers individuals a financial reward in exchange for providing the CRA with “specific and credible details” about a case of major international tax non-compliance on a confidential basis.
Specifically, the CRA offers contracts leading to an award if the potential assessment of taxes, excluding interest and penalties, exceeds $100,000. However, the actual payment of the award is made only when $100,000 of the taxes relating to the assessments has been collected and all recourse rights have been exhausted. The reward ranges from 5% to 15% of taxes collected, depending on the nature and quality of information the whistleblower provided to the CRA, excluding interest and penalties.
The CRA has now entered into more than a dozen contracts with whistleblowers under the OTIP program, Kohnen said. In comparison, the CRA had yet to finalize any contracts with informants under the program at the same time last year.
“That would suggest, to me at least, that the program is progressing,” Kohnen said.
Any individual is eligible to participate in OTIP as an informant, provided he or she hasn’t committed tax evasion or a related offense. Also ineligible are CRA employees and federal, provincial or municipal employees or related individuals who have obtained information about tax evasion as part of their work.
The government first announced the OTIP in Budget 2013 as part of a broader set of initiatives intended to combat offshore tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance.
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