Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), the federal tax agency, reported on Tuesday that Canadian companies have avoided paying up to $11.4 billion worth of taxes.
CRA released its fifth and final report on the "tax gap," this one focused on corporate taxes. Previous reports examined factors such as sales tax fraud, domestic tax evasion, and the use of offshore tax havens to look at how much leakage Canada's taxation system experiences in a given year.
Tuesday's report estimates that in the 2014 tax year, Canadian corporations managed to pay $11.4 billion less than they should have in taxes. Bigger companies seem to be responsible for a bigger chunk of corporate tax leakage. The CRA report says small companies avoided paying $3.5 billion in taxes, while larger companies avoided $7.9 billion of taxes.
CRA is trying to crack down on tax avoidance, and says that it thinks it will be able to recoup between 55% and 65% of the corporate taxes it feels it is owed for 2014. The data released by CRA suggests that Ottawa didn't collect almost one dollar out of every $6 worth of corporate taxes it was entitled to in 2014, the tax year that was examined.
