{"id":469,"date":"2013-03-04T17:39:50","date_gmt":"2013-03-04T17:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thor.ca\/\/blog\/?p=469"},"modified":"2025-02-12T13:29:33","modified_gmt":"2025-02-12T21:29:33","slug":"minister-failed-to-tell-the-whole-truth-in-obtaining-audit-authorization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/2013\/03\/minister-failed-to-tell-the-whole-truth-in-obtaining-audit-authorization\/","title":{"rendered":"Minister failed to tell the whole truth in obtaining audit authorization"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/thor.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/2013-FCA-50.pdf\"><i>MNR v. RBC Life Insurance Company<\/i><\/a>, 2013 FCA 50, the Federal Court of Appeal (FCA) confirmed that it has the inherent power to prevent an abuse of the court process \u2013 including and perhaps especially by government agencies.\u00a0 This inherent power includes an overriding discretion in either the grant of, or the review of, any order that authorizes the Minister of National Revenue (Minister) to require a person to provide information relating to unnamed third parties (s. 231.2(3) and s. 231.2(6)).\u00a0 In this particular case, the FCA affirmed the lower court\u2019s decision that the Minister failed to disclose <i>all<\/i> relevant information to the court when the Minister initially sought and obtained an order requiring RBC Life Insurance Company (and others) to produce information relating to customers who had purchased a tax-advantaged insurance product.\u00a0 The relevant information (produced in a review of the original order) showed that the Minister\u2019s primary goal was in fact to \u201cchill\u201d the particular tax-related insurance business, which the Minister disliked on policy grounds. \u00a0Verifying compliance with the <i>Income Tax Act<\/i> was merely a secondary or subservient purpose.\u00a0 As a result, the audit authorization was improperly obtained and therefore invalid.\u00a0 The FCA\u2019s decision means that the bar is now set very high for the Minister to tell the <i>whole<\/i> story when seeking an <i>ex parte<\/i> order under s. 231.2(3).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/thor.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/2013-FCA-50.pdf\"><i>MNR v. RBC Life Insurance Company<\/i><\/a>, 2013 FCA 50, the Federal Court of Appeal (FCA) confirmed that it has the inherent power to prevent an abuse of the court process \u2013 including and perhaps especially by government agencies.\u00a0&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corporate-tax"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2804,"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions\/2804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thor.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}