What is the standard of conduct for an officer and director to be held responsible for a company's failure to remit taxes?

More is expected of officers and directors with superior qualifications, such as experienced business people, and more is expected of inside directors who have much greater involvement in corporate decision making and much greater direct access to corporate information. In Soper v. Canada, a case concerning a director's responsibility for a company's failure to remit taxes, Robertson J.A. stated that: it is difficult to deny that inside directors, meaning those involved in the day to day management of the company and who influence the conduct of its business affairs, will have the most difficulty in establishing the due diligence defence. For such individuals, it will be a challenge to argue convincingly that, despite their daily role in corporate management, they lacked business acumen to the extent that that factor should overtake the assumption that they did know, or ought to have known, of both remittance requirements and any problem in this regard. (Soper v. Canada (1997), 1997 CanLII 6352 (FCA), F.C.J. No. 881, at para. 41; see also Re YBM, supra, at paras. 177, 183 and 184)