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The Canada Revenue Agency claims at least nine people have been convicted of offshore tax evasion over the last two years, receiving $4 million in fines and 84 months of jail time, but it is keeping the names of these tax cheats secret.

Yet there are dozens of people — carpenters, hairdressers, farmers, plumbers, foresters, realtors, architects — who are named and shamed on the CRA’s website for not paying small amounts of tax.

This double standard means that small business owners who fall behind on tax payments, or servers who don’t declare their tips, are publicly outed for their relatively paltry offences, while wealthy individuals and businesses caught hiding millions in offshore tax havens are guaranteed anonymity.

Even though criminal convictions for tax evasion should be public information, without the defendants’ names, case numbers or knowledge of which courthouse the convictions were handed down in, it’s impossible to determine the identities of offshore tax cheats.