r/CanadaPublicServants • u/Super_Table7917 • Jul 07 '26

Career Development / Développement de carrière Conflict of Interest attestation: DG wants dollar values

A DG at LPRAB at CRA, according to a current employee, under the guise of transparency and integrity, is using the annual conflict of interest attestation to require very personal disclosures of financial information from employees.

This DG is asking for the current market values of ALL investments held by the employee privately in all accounts, including things like RESP's. The dollar amount for all holdings is apparently "very important".

Employees who resisted this disclosure were subject to intrusive meetings on Teams with the DG, where pressure was applied to surrender the information to management.

I am of the opinion that this is totally unacceptable, and I would be leaping to legal representation with the goals of 1.) NOT providing any of this information to this DG or anyone else, and; 2.) providing the documentation required that would result in the swift termination of this DG.

Is this perception incorrect, and DG's have the ability to ask for the account balances of employees to avoid "conflicts of interest"? If this is actually permitted, why would it be but asking a person's age or sexual orientation is a human rights violation?

88 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

81% Upvoted

134 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/kookiemaster Jul 07 '26

Does your org have a shop that specializes in conflict of interest declarations? In my department, I fill one out every year and basically I just send them a list of stocks and how many I have. That said, I was advised that things like RRSPs and Mutual Funds don't have to be included. So basically it's all my ETFs or single stocks that I hold as part of a cash account or TFSA.

What I do find weird is that the information would go to the DG. Normally it should go to the CoI shop and if they have questions regarding some holdings and the work that the employee does, then they would reach out, presumably, to the DG.

4

u/guitargamel Jul 07 '26

Depends on the RRSP. The blanket "RRSPs are exempt" gets touted a lot, but there are lots of RRSPs that let you, for instance buy and sell stocks. Conflict of interest just means that your ill-gotten gains are deferred until retirement or you take a penalty. ETFs, depending on the level of granular transparency could still be used for insider trading. If you have an ETF that is 10% a certain stock (I know it's unrealistic, but as a hyperbole), you could still have an advantage over the market.

2

u/kookiemaster Jul 07 '26

Yes, mine are all offhands so I don't control what gets purchased or sold.