Bringing about a higher level of transparency and accountability in provincial and federal governments to help protect taxpayers from abuse
The Federal Court of Canada has ordered U.S.-based PayPal to hand over details about its business account customers to Canadian tax authorities.
The court order, obtained by the Canada Revenue Agency, forces the U.S.-based payment processing firm to release information about Canadians with PayPal business accounts who processed transactions between the start of 2014 and last Friday.
Read more at CBC News
Canada’s 60 biggest corporations have more than 1,000 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens, depriving government coffers of up to $15 billion annually, according to a new report being published Wednesday.
The report, titled “Bay Street and Tax Havens: Curbing Corporate Canada’s Addiction” and prepared by the group Canadians for Tax Fairness, shines a light on one of the legal methods used by big corporations to reduce their taxes — tax havens.
Read more at The Toronto Star
The region could potentially establish a mobile health unit to address the current opioid crisis faced by local communities.
Regional council endorsed a plan at its latest meeting to have the health and social services departments investigate “the costs of operating the proposed unit, which would potentially be staffed with outreach, addiction, counselling, medical and health professionals operating in partnership with local health and social service agencies”, with a report to be brought back for 2018 budget deliberations.
Read more at The Oshawa Express
President Trump has selected Alex Azar, a former pharmaceutical executive and a top health official during the George W. Bush administration, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
In announcing that he is nominating Azar to be secretary of the government’s largest civilian department, the president turned to a health policy insider and conservative thinker. Azar spent a decade at Eli Lilly and Co., including five years as president of Lilly USA, its biggest affiliate, before stepping down in January to work as a health-care consultant.
Read more at The Washington Post
As the sun sets over the week-long Paradise Papers media blitz, the sky clouded with 13-million pages of illegally-obtained privacy-breaching documents filled with implied wrongdoing, the world is left with a big question: What the hell was that all about?
Well, for one thing, we learn that it is quite acceptable to breach the privacy of Canadians and citizens of other countries, provided those citizens are rich. Canada‘s Privacy Act is a rigid piece of legislation that attempts to prevent companies, governments and individuals from disclosing private information. When Equifax Canada recently reported a cyberattack that compromised credit card and other information about 100,000 Canadians, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner swung into action: “The investigation is a priority for our office given the sensitivity of the personal information that Equifax holds.”
Read more at Financial Post
In the decade between 2002 and 2012, spending on the criminal justice system increased from approximately $12,200,000,000.00 (i.e., 12.2 billion dollars), to approximately $20,300,000,000.00 (i.e., 20.3 billion dollars). This rise occurred despite the fact that during the same period, incidents of reported crime decreased by approximately 30%.
The rise in spending on the criminal justice, thus represents an increase of approximately 66% (i.e., an average increase of approximately 5.2% per year) at the same time the number of reported incidents of crime were falling at an average rate of approximately 3.5%. Assuming the pattern has held true over the last 5 years, one can now estimate that Canadian taxpayers are currently spending approximately, $28,000,000,000.00 (i.e., 28 billion dollars) per year (i.e., approximately 77 million dollars per day), for a problem that affects, at most, 5% of the population each year (see: crime rate per capita below).
Read more at Criminal Law Reform
As Canada’s total health spend is expected to reach $242 billion by the end of 2017, the amount spent on drugs is expected to grow at the fastest pace, according to new figures by the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
The total projected growth in health spending for 2017 is about four per cent, a slight increase on 2016. Since 2010, the average annual increase has been 3.2 per cent. The total estimated growth of drug spending for the year is 5.2 per cent, followed by growth in physician spending (4.4 per cent) and in hospital spending (2.9 per cent).
Read more at Benefits Canada
An ongoing Canada Revenue Agency scam has taken a high-tech turn that’s defrauded members of the public out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Police in York Region said 40 victims in the community have sent more than $300,000 to fraudsters using Bitcoin machines.
Police said the victims have been contacted by phone and told that they have overdue taxes to pay and if they don’t, they will be arrested. In the recent cases, the victims have been told to send their money using Bitcoin ATMs.
Read more at City News
OTTAWA — About one-fifth of a group of wealthy Canadians who took part in a federal government survey last year didn’t believe that a proposed advertising campaign about a federal crackdown on tax cheats would do anything to deter people from using overseas tax havens.
There was a similar response from “high net worth” respondents who took part in the survey, conducted last December but released only recently. About one quarter of respondents didn’t believe that the Canada Revenue Agency ads would deter people from taking part in the underground economy.
Read more at CTV News
OTTAWA – The Canada Revenue Agency says it won’t hesitate to investigate new evidence of offshore tax evasion in the wake of a second massive leak of tax haven financial records.
The leak of some 13.4 million records, dubbed the Paradise Papers, lifts another veil on the often murky ways in which the wealthy – including more than 3,000 Canadian individuals and entities – stash their money in offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes.
Read more at Maclean’s Magazine