Tracking down the man who made off with $10M from taxpayers

I'm Stephen D'Souza, and this is how we uncovered conspiracy theorists swindling millions from the Canada Revenue Agency. We were leaked confidential information about an internal CRA investigation, a case that's never been made public. It exposed glaring weaknesses at the CRA. The tax authority was looking into a man who was approved to get a $40 million refund, money he wasn't entitled to. Let's start at the beginning. The leaked info told us three things. Number one, a bank had stepped in to stop the massive refund from being paid out. Number two, there were references to tax protester language. I'll get to that in a second. And finally, number three, a name. Jonathan Pierce. At this point, we really didn't know that conspiracy theories were behind the scheme. But we had information about another multi-million dollar swindle involving the CRA. Court records showing a case involving a couple from BC. They've denied wrongdoing, but their case mentioned tax protester language. What we thought were two separate cases of the CRA getting duped were actually connected. The people involved were part of the same loose network, the world of sovereign citizens. Pearce was becoming a so-called sovereign citizen, someone who believes the government is actually a corporation and all of us are its slaves. There were no shortage of examples on Jonathan Pearce's Facebook page. After he rejected our interview request, we approached with hidden cameras. There's no such thing as a natural person. Sorry, there's a lot of different terms out there. But a person is a mask an actor wears on a stage. You have a person, but you are not one. Understand that. Visiting Pearce led us to another key document. He told us the exact date that the CRA searched his house. The agency needed court authorization to do that, and those documents can be available to the public in some cases. We started at the local courthouse, but no luck there. It took us weeks, but we finally were told that a physical copy was available at the Ontario Court of Justice in Ottawa. It corroborated information we already had, the amounts deposited to Pierce and the forms that he had filled out. We also learned that he said he had trust valued at $99 billion and that he was authorized to file on behalf of five other people. In total, he had requested close to $181 million in tax refunds. The CRA said that the people Pierce had filed for hadn't yet tried the scheme themselves, so that money wasn't paid out. As it stands, Pearce still got $10 million before authorities stepped in. If Pierce's bank hadn't alerted the CRA the agency could have been duped into paying millions more. I thought they would turn around and say I'm sorry sir you can't this doesn't work that way. Right. Next thing you know getting a refund. Well f**k this works. Well this is an easy way to create money. The search warrant is where we also learned that Pierce had called the CRA and laid out his conspiracy beliefs before they paid him. It's a small detail mentioned 50 pages into this document. In the appendix, it mentions the calls he made to the CRA and it lists the dates. Here's what we still don't understand. Why wasn't that call and the clearly false paperwork enough to catch the attention of the CRA? The agency says they've made significant progress in addressing these types of scams. But because of privacy laws and because they don't track people's intent, the CRA could not tell us how much they've paid out to so-called tax protesters and sovereigns. If the CRA gives me money, who are you to f***ing question it? As far as I'm concerned, it was between me and CRA. If CRA had a problem, they wouldn't have given me the money.