Liberal Senator Percy Downe has written Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, asking that he investigate the Canada Revenue Agency’s (CRA) failure to apply sufficient resources to fight overseas tax evasion.
Tax Avoidance: first Facebook, then Starbucks, now it's Cirque du Soleil
Les stratagèmes auxquels recourent les entreprises pour éviter de payer des impôts et des taxes défient l’imagination. L’une des pratiques les plus cyniques porte sur les prix de transfert. Et l’un des exemples les plus courants est la manière dont les multinationales s’en servent pour éviter de payer des impôts et des taxes sur le lucratif commerce des bananes,
Y a-t-il encore quelqu’un qui se surprend que la Banque Royale et la Banque TD aient connu l’un des trimestres les plus rentables de leur histoire?
Nearly a quarter of all Canadian overseas investment dollars end up in tax havens. Those latest Statistics Canada figures are considered low because notorious havens like Monaco and Liechtenstein don’t share much information with Canada.
The figures show that more than half the money is flowing through the finance and insurance industry as opposed to manufacturing and agriculture.
The lengths that some corporations will go to avoid paying tax is mind-boggling.
One of the more cynical practices is called transfer pricing. And one of the most popular examples is how multi-nationals use it to avoid paying taxes on their lucrative banana trade.
That's the opinion of two experts - one Canadian and one American - who recently talked to CBC's The Current.
"Tax havens are more or less countries as bankers wish them to be," says Alain Denault, author of the soon to be published Imperial Canada Inc.
Denault points out that when former Prime Minister Paul Martin was questioned and criticized for his companies' use of tax havens, he never had a good explanation of why it was a necessary business practice.
By Peter Gillespie
Until recently, tax policy has been the exclusive domain of experts. This is changing, however, as citizen's groups around the world have begun to research and advocate on tax matters.
Rich individuals and their families have as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, according to a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited from the International Tax Justice Network (TJN).
This translates into as much as $280 billion in lost income tax revenues that could be paying down government debt and supporting public services and education.
New research published by the Tax Justice Network shows that tax evasion costs governments around the world more than US$3.1 trillion annually.
In Canada an estimated $81 billion a year is lost to tax evasion in the ‘shadow economy’ - that is half of our total healthcare spending. Canada ranks 11th out of the 145 countries surveyed in total amount of tax evaded.
