Liberty and justice for all United States persons abroad

The Isaac Brock Society

Posted on by Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 31 Comments

This was originally posted by Lynne Swanson on Maple Sandbox as “CRA Response (Sort Of) on FATCA ATI & Order Paper Questions”

For me, the key message is that CRA refused to answer key questions on the September 2015 FATCA turnover that were raised in a Parliament. Lynne says below for example: “And of course, CRA won’t tell us how many or types of records they received from IRS–citing confidentiality and secrecy requirements of the Treaty.”

The questions asked were:

Q-1072
– April 18, 2016 – Mr. Dusseault (Sherbrooke} – With regard to the exchange information between Canada and the United States {US) under the Foreign .Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA): (a) how many individuals were reported in total and broken down by (i) Canadian citizens (ii) permanent residents of Canada, (iii) temporary residents of Canada; (b) how many individuals were reported, broken down by (i) individuals with Canadian addresses, (ii) individuals with US addresses, (iii) individuals with addresses in other countries; (c) how many accounts were reported, in total and broken down by (i) bank accounts {ii) credit union accounts, {iii) investment accounts, (iv) insurance accounts, (v) other types of accounts; {d) with respect to {c)(iii)~ what types of insurance accounts were reported; (e) With respect to (c}(v), what other types of accounts were reported; (f} of the accounts reported. how many were (i) under $50,000 US, (ii) between $50,000 and $1,000,000 US, (iii) over $1,000,000 US; (g) of the accounts reported, how many were (i) Registered Retirement Savings Account accounts (ii) Registered Education Savings Account accounts,(iii) Registered Disability Savings_Account accounts, (iv) Tax Free Savings Accounts accounts ;(h) of the accounts reported, how many were held jointly with one or more non US persons. broken down by type of account and indicating the type of relationship between the Joint account holder and the us person if it is known; (i) how·many accounts of organizations were reported to the IRS because a US person had signing authority, interest in; or other connection to the organization; (j) of the accounts that were reported. how many were (i) business accounts, (ii) professional accounts, (Iii) charitable or non-profit organization {iv)connected to other organizations, broken down by type of organization; (k) what agency. organization and individuals was the information provided to; (l) what measures were taken to ensure this information wlll not.be provided to any other agency, organizatiqn and indivlduals; (m) what measures were taken to ensure that information transmitted wil not be subject to identity theft. fraud, other criminal activities, or breach of privacy; (n) how many records did Canada receive from the US, in total and broken down by (i) individuals who live in Canada, (ii} individuals who live in the us, (iii) individuals who live in other countries, broken down by country; (o) how many accounts did Canada receive information about; (p) What type of information was in the records Canada received; (q) did Canada receive information regarding (i) income fr~m the accounts (ii) total assets in accounts (iii) account balances (iv) transactions. deposits and withdrawals, (v) account numbers, (vi): names of account holders, (vii) Social Insurance Numbers, (viii) other related information; (r} what type of information did Canada receive that was not provided by the us prior to the FATCA Intergovemmental Agreement and (s) when did Canada.receive the information?

Lynne says:

“You may recall I submitted an Access to Information request to Canada Revenue Agency on March 29, 2016 about information that was transmitted to the IRS.

CRA advised me they required 120 days beyond the legislated 30 days to respond. After I learned the government is not required to gather the data if it does not already have it for an ATI request, but they are required to do this for an Order Paper Question, I contacted Pierre-Luc Dusseault’s Assistant. Mr. Dusseault submitted the questions in an Order Paper April 18.

The government responded to Mr. Dusseault on June 3. Here is CRA’s response to him (I don’t know why they need 120 days to reply to me now that the information is available).

Here is what CRA says:

With respect to the above noted question, what follows is the response from the Canada Revenue Agency {CRA).

Part (a): A total of 154,667 records were submitted to the Internal Revenue Service {IRS) including individuals and entities. There are multiple instances where the same individual or entity has more than one record.

Parts (a)(i). to {iii): This information is not required to be reported to the CRA with respect to Part XVIII of the Income Tax Act(!TA}.

Part (b){i): 95,693 records show an address’ in Canada.
Part {b)(ii): 54.893 re.cords snow an ~ddress in the United States.
Part (b)(iii); 3.,881 records· show an address. in· another country.

Part (c}: A total of 154,667 records were submitted to the IRS: however,. the number of accounts this represents is not known given the rules regarding account aggregation and joint accounts.

Parts ( c)(i} to (v), (d} and (e): These type of accounts are not required to be reported to the CRA under Part XVJH of the ITA and Article 2(2} a) of the Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA).

Part (f)(i): The number of accounts where an individual or entity has less than $50,QOO US is not known by the CRA given the rules regarding account aggregation and joint accounts.
Part {f)(ii}: The number of acc6unts where an individual or entity between $50,000 and $1,000,000 U.S. is not known by the CRA given the rules regarding account aggregation and joint accounts.
Part {f)(iii): The number of accounts where an individual or entity· has over $1,000,,000 U.S is not known by the CRA given the rules regarding account aggregation and joint accounts.

Part (g)(i): This type of account is not reportable to the CRA pursuant to Part XVIII of the ITA and Section IV.A of Annex II of the IGA.
.
Part (g}(ii): This type of account is not reportable to the CRA pursuant to Part XVIII of the ITA and Section IV.G of Annex II of the IGA. ·
Part (g)(iii): This type of account is not reportable to the CRA pursuant to Part XVII of the IGA and Section IV.F of Annex II of the IGA. .
Part (g)(iv)~ This type of ac0ount is not reportable to the CRA pursuant to Part XVIII of the ITA and Section IV.E of Annex II of the IGA.

Parts(h}f {I) and (/1: This information is not required to be reported to the CRA pursuant to Part XVIII of the IT A and Article 2(2)a) of the IGA.

Part (k): The information was provided to the U.S. IRS.

Parts (l) and (m}: Exchanges between CRA and the IRS are subject to.restrictions, administrative safegµards and understandings regarding protection and usage of the information, in accordance with the Convention between Canada and the United States of America with Respect to Taxes on Income and on Capital (Canada-U.S, Treaty}. The CRA is committed to protecting all taxpayer information and each of Canada’s tax treaties contains strict confidentiality requirements in order to safeguard information and ensure confidentiality.

Parts (n)(i) to (iii), (o), (p), (q), (r): The CRA is unable to respond to these parts of the question given that the Canada-U.S. Treaty requires that information be treated as secret and only disclosed to persons or authorities involved in the assessment or collection, administration and/or enforcement.

Part (s): Canada received the information on September 30, 2015.

So what did we learn from all of that? Well, we now know the majority (about 62%) of the accounts reported were for Canadian addresses. About 35.5% were for U.S. addresses and 2.5% were for addresses in other countries. CRA did not provide which other countries.

Beyond that, CRA seems to be playing their usual obfuscation game. They say they don’t have the information on how many accounts were reported on Canadian citizens, permanent residents or temporary residents. They claim to not know how many were bank accounts, credit union accounts, insurance accounts, etc.

They claim not to know how many accounts were under $50,000, how many $50,000-$1 million, how many over $1 million. What?!? They reported them. How can they not know that?!?

They say RRSPs, RESPs, RDSPs and TFSAs are “not reportable.” That does not answer the question about whether any were reported. There is a difference between “not reportable” and not reported.

CRA says financial institutions are not required to provide information on how many accounts were joint accounts with non U.S. persons or how many were accounts of employers, businesses or charitable organizations where a “U.S. person” has signing authority.

CRA says IRS will safeguard FATCA information. I guess CRA does not know that identity theft is a “major problem” at the IRS and is getting worse (and with far less information than what will be provided under FATCA. Or maybe CRA doesn’t know that the Investigations Committee of Congress has demanded FATCA information be made available to U.S. law enforcement and national security agencies.

And of course, CRA won’t tell us how many or types of records they received from IRS–citing confidentiality and secrecy requirements of the Treaty. Gee whiz. It would be nice if they showed the same concern for Canadian citizens and residents as they do for the rights of a foreign tax regime.”

31 thoughts on “CANADA REVENUE “Answers” to Key Questions on What FATCA Turned Over to US IRS and What CRA Got in Return From IRS in 2015”

  1. See CRA response to “specifics” of what it turned over to IRS and what IRS turned over to CRA as part of FATCA “agreement” imposed on Canada by U.S.

    Lynne Swanson provided the questions to the NDP Revenue critic who submitted the questions via Parliament.

    CRA “response” is very disappointing.

  2. My MP is useless. After several months of her office saying that they are working on establishing whether my Canadian banking information was sent to the IRS through the CRA, I decided that I’d write to the Revenue Minister myself. Within a short time, I heard from someone from the CRA who said they would mail the CRA’s response to me.

    That was a couple of weeks ago. We will soon find out whether a Canadian making a direct request to the CRA for verification will result in any kind of disclosure by the CRA – something Privacy Commissioner Therrien said should be automatic.

  3. the tax act should be amended to require this information be provided to the taxpayer on the annual assessment. there would be no violation of confidentiality in giving this information to the taxpayer concerned. what we do with our own information is none of the CRA’s business

  4. @patricia

    The irony would be that there would probably have to be a big privacy impact study done before the CRA would automatically I form us!

    I do in fact know that my info was sent to the CRA, as I asked RBC Dominion whether they had sent it and they confirmed that because I had signed a W-9 with them they had done so.

    I also asked my local branch of RBC the same question and they told me I had to ask the CRA (in spite of their requirement to inform me of such upon request). The CRA in turn told me that I had to take my request directly to the Revenue Minister. The Revenue Minister has now apparently punted it back to the CRA.

    I want to know just what was sent, and confirmed who did it. It may very well be that my RBC account info was also sent if the CRA cross references all accounts associated with a particular taxpayer (all without probable cause of course!).

  7. I managed to get a 30 minute interview with my new Liberal MP and after describing my
    situation of living in Canada for all but two of my 64 years and being a Canadian Citizen
    since 1976 the first thing he said was ‘your government does not want to set a precedent
    by helping you because it would open up a whole can of worms’.
    Enough said, our government is not willing to to help us.

  9. This needs to be on the front pages of the newspapers but they do not appear to be
    independent thinking and are actually complicit in this whole tax grab. We need
    Trudeau to have another brain cramp like he had in the house and just tell the IRS to
    take a hike.

  10. @Petros: Re: Canadians with mental illness denied US entry. Not terribly surprising. They already have enough mentally ill people down there (and some of them are even running for President).

    @We are all Canucks: You should have told the guy its too late; the can is already open and the worms are crawling every which way but back into the can. I’ll see you in court.

  12. “CRA won’t tell us how many or types of records they received from IRS–citing confidentiality and secrecy requirements of the Treaty.”

    Uh, but they did tell us how many records were sent to the IRS, so I guess the secrecy only works in one direction. Typical BS.

  14. The NDP should propose an amendment to the tax act that requires that FATCA “slips” to also note the nationality of the account holder with a further amendment that a Canadian Citizen resident in Canada shall solely be notated as a Canadian Citizen.

  15. I continue to wonder what aspect/s of FATCA the government feels least confident about being able to defend. They are not honest nor trustworthy. The actions and emails referred to in Prof. Christians latest paper ( see also footnotes; Christians, Allison, ‘While Parliament Sleeps: Tax Treaty Practice in Canada’ (May 17, 2016). 10 J. Parl. & Political L. 15 (2016). http://ssrn.com/abstract=2780874 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2780874 ) underscore this. We are pawns to them, not citizens with rights. They (both CONS, and now FibbinLibs ) acknowledge (very disingenuously) in some token degree a privacy aspect which they assert is solved by having the FIs report to the IRS via the CRA (though most likely their game is only a pretense of honesty – by acknowledging and even raising a sub-portion of an aspect they think they have covered, in order to subvert and deflect the issues and angles they don’t want to talk about), but they never ever acknowledge the clear discrimination based on national origin/US birthplace. In fact, they continue to refer those affected Canadians to the US for redress, as if we are not CANADIAN CITIZENS or not legal permanent Canadian residents on Canadian sovereign soil – under Canadian sovereign jurisdiction. It must be part of their ‘communications strategy’ to downplay that glaring fact – that they are perpetuating discrimination against some Canadians, at the behest of a foreign government, and letting that foreign government claim anyone they want to as “US taxable citizen/persons”. The history of US citizenship and immigration is torturous and complex with many twists and turns and reversions over time – and it is very obvious that there is very good reason for Canada and other countries not to assist in enforcing US decisions about who is a US taxpayer and who is not – when they reside outside US borders.

    Canada should not be reinforcing and enforcing Canadian citizens’ and permanent residents’ forced fealty to the US Emperor and an economic version of impressment as demanded extraterritorially by the US and supported by the Canadian government via their continued defence of and implementation of the FATCA IGA.

  16. “the first thing he said was ‘your government does not want to set a precedent
    by helping you because it would open up a whole can of worms’.”

    @We are all Canucks
    Suggest you go back and get that in writing. Hammer your MP.

    Government trying to sidestep a messy situation should never be allowed to justify denying Canadians their constitutional rights.

  17. @Shovel, and @We are all Canucks
    re; “‘your government does not want to set a precedent
    by helping you because it would open up a whole can of worms’”

    Yeah, apparently according to the logic of the MP who in a cowardly and incompetent manner deflected his/her duty of care towards a Canadian citizen, resident and constituent; apparently, that MP believes that in terms of assisting and defending Canadian citizens and residents of Canada against the extraterritorial predations of a foreign nation seeking extraterritorial jurisdiction over Canadian owned and sited data and financial assets – any assistance at all from our own government of Canada and Prime Minister would be apparently “…opening a whole can of worms”.

    Is the government of Canada a branch plant of the US government? Does it have any gonads at all? None on display in that answer. The only worms (or leeches) are those MPs that after opposing FATCA are now enforcing and defending it in Canada. And the serpents who betrayed us in the first place.

  18. Good questions from Mr. Dusseault. Questionable answers from the CRA. Now I have a question. Why is Bill Morneau, Minister of Finance, attending the Bilderberg meeting in Dresden, Germany, today? Also, why in the world (and off this world) is Chris Hadfield, Canadian astronaut, among the listed attendees?

  19. …and why don’t we see in the Canadian mainstream media that Canada’s Finance Minister and Astronaut Chris Hadfield are attending? At least, I haven’t seen anything – yet.

  22. We need a reporter to ask what Canada plans to do about the US’ lack of participation in CRS, Calgary411.

  23. The Canadian government is unable to provide any assistance to Canadian citizens because it has already committed all of its resources to assisting the IRS.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.

%d bloggers like this: