This one's for Faye, Elayne and Phil.....

A few years ago, I was in Vancouver with a few Canada Revenue Agency colleagues.  As we were enjoying a libation or two on a patio after a gruelling day of pissing field personnel off.  (They hate visits from HQ, as they always think we know nothing and they know everything.  They also think we exist purely to bug them and keep them from actually "working".  In many cases, of course, they are right; nevertheless, we have to conduct field visits from time to time to justify our existence.  When I first started I had to fake it for a while until I really did know my job, but I digress.) 

As we were being served by our waiter, obviously a relatively new immigrant, judging from his limited English, I said, "Excuse me young man, we are from Revenue Canada and I want to know if you are declaring all your tips."  He paled.  "I could go on the mainframe right now and look you up and I can guarantee you are not."  He turned whiter and grabbed the back of a chair.  (By the way, I could not go on the mainframe and look him up without a reason or I would have been fired.  That's so we don't look at the returns of celebraties and the like.  But he didn't know that.)  Here's how things work, I continued. 

"Taxes pay for things like health care.  You cannot get a heart transplant in the underground economy.  That's not how it works.    Everyone declares all their income and pays all their taxes, got that?  Now when you go home, I want you to tell all your relatives that's how it works in Canada."  He nodded vigorously and ran off as fast as he could.  By this time, my colleagues were killing themselves laughing, but I may have accomplished something.  If not, more audits such as the one conducted recently in St. Catherines will.

It seems that a pilot project targetting 145 servers in just four restaurants -- that's right, four -- found that in only two years, these servers managed to slide $1.7 million into their aprons without paying tax.  That's $12,000 per thief!  "The amount of unreported income was very surprising," the report concluded.  That's an understatement.   

It's about time we started hitting the underground economy, where an estimated $36 billion per year is pocketed by waiters, painters, plumbers, electricians, landscapers, handymen.............and the like.  I could never figure out why we didn't go after these taxes with more vigour?  Apparently my old friends at RevCan are now doing so.