RCMP CRA conspire to fabricate evidence

Today’s blog entry is a true story about what happened to a tax auditor in December 2011 working at the CRA’s Montreal Tax Service Office (TSO). The auditor was targeted by the CRA's Internal Affairs and Fraud Prevention Department's investigator Pierre Léveillé when the auditor turned whistle blower: he distributed documents, that he had received in the mail, alleging that the director of the Montreal TSO, Mr. Patrice Chouinard, had helped his entourage at the Laval TSO steal $1.2 million.

Note: Pierre Léveillé was the IAFPD investigator who made the remark that there were too many Italians in management at the Montreal TSO; in addition to other racist comments he's made in the past regarding Italian employees. There are sworn affidavits to this effect. The auditor in our story was of Italian decent. See a problem here? The CRA didn’t; their view was that the racism displayed by Léveillé was just an interview tactic! We have than in black and white; imagine the level of intelligence of the senior Ottawa civil servant willingly putting that in writing!

So, to get back to our story, we’ll quickly summarize the most outrageous accusation made by the IAFPD investigator:

Mr. Léveillé accused the auditor of losing protected CRA property when he left the Montreal TSO a few nights earlier. Mr. Léveillé also let the auditor know that the documents had been found and returned to the Montreal TSO by a passerby walking in downtown Montreal (a couple of kilometers from the office). Additionally, all of this had been captured on a building's security camera.

The accusation was later withdrawn for the following reasons:

• The alleged video from the building security camera turned out to be a video made from someone’s iPhone; all those who have seen it have told us that it was a poor attempt to create a video of an event which never happened, in essence it was a complete fabrication and a poorly done one at best.
  • The video did not capture the auditor losing protected information as Mr. Léveillé had claimed. The video began with a briefcase on the sidewalk in front of some establishment in downtown Montreal (how it got there was apparently not important to the IAFPD); a shadowy figure (who remains unidentified to this day) walks up to the briefcase, opens it, shuffles through the papers and leaves the scene with it.
• When the briefcase was returned to the Montreal TSO; it was brought directly to Mr. Chouinard's office, bypassing the usual protocol for lost and stolen items. Security personnel had been pre-alerted that missing documents were coming back to the office that day; they were told not to get any information which might identify the person who found the “lost” briefcase containing the documents.
• Finally, Mr. Léveillé and Mr. Chouinard obviously forgot that the Montreal TSO is equipped with security cameras and security guards. The office is used to guard sensitive taxpayer information. The security cameras showed that the auditor had not left the building with the briefcase containing the documents in question.

We believe this incident is just one reason why Pierre Léveillé is no longer working for the CRA; but don’t worry about him because the CRA doesn’t fire accomplices, they just reassigned them to other divisions of the Canadian government.

So you might wonder why we are bringing this up now, 3 years after the fact.

We were recently shown an email (obtained though the Access to Information Act) from Constable Pierre Breton, of the RCMP, to Pierre Léveillé which clearly indicates that the RCMP was aware that evidence was being fabricated, and furthermore was requesting that Mr. Léveillé change the time stamp on the video... Imagine the RCMP asking that already fake evidence be modified some more. The email is in several people’s hands including some attorneys in the Montreal area.

If you are willing to share fabricated evidence or are willing to provide perjured statement(s), we urge you to contact Constable Pierre Breton of the RCMP.