Guilty Until Proven Innocent: A Man’s 12-year Battle with Revenu Québec

The police came into Jean-François Thibault’s home like a wrecking ball.

They flashed a search warrant and immediately went to work: overturning drawers, laying out piles of documents on the floor, and tracking dirt inside with their boots. 

As detectives ransacked the house for evidence of a money-laundering operation, they taunted Thibault about involving his children in their investigation. But it didn’t feel like an investigation to Thibault. It felt like he’d already been convicted.

“As they were leaving, they gave us a card and said, ‘If you have any problems, call this number,’” said Thibault. “Our lawyer told me, ‘The reason they’re so aggressive is that, while you’re busy cleaning up after them, you’re not defending yourself.’ It took us days to get the house back in order.”

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Though the criminal investigation against Thibault fizzled out in 2017, Revenu Québec dragged him through the courts for years over allegations of tax evasion related to his cheque-cashing business. The legal battle, which lasted 11 years, saw Thibault spend $1.2 million in lawyers’ fees, shuttered his cheque-cashing business, and nearly cleaned him out.

And though a 2025 ruling from the Court of Quebec absolved him of wrongdoing, at least one of Thibault’s associates is still going through hell to prove his innocence. 

Revenu Québec — whose aggressive tactics have even been called out by two separate government reports — claims its tactics have been refined since the unfortunate business with Thibault. 

But Thibault, his associates, and two sources inside the government say Quebec’s tax agency has too much leeway to use borderline-illegal tactics and the state’s near-bottomless resources against small business owners. This is their story.

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Thibault was one of 17 suspects arrested in Projet Hantise, a Sûreté du Québec (SQ) task force that targeted cheque-cashing businesses accused of laundering money for organized crime. 

News of Thibault’s 2014 arrest and money-laundering charges was published in the Journal de Montréal under the headline “They hid millions from tax authorities.” Nowhere in the news brief is it mentioned that nothing had been proven in court.

In short order, Thibault’s retirement savings were frozen, some of his oldest clients abandoned him, he closed his business and nearly lost his house. As Thibault’s life fell apart, police repeatedly told him he’d serve years in prison if he didn’t cooperate. 

There was just one problem. 

Projet Hantise rested on the testimony of a convicted fraudster, according to court documents obtained by The Rover. The fraudster was a business associate of Thibault’s called Robert Viger. He agreed to testify against Thibault in 2014, after he was arrested by the SQ in connection with a money-laundering investigation. 

Police told Viger they would throw his wife and son in prison if he refused to cooperate.

With no material evidence against Thibault and with Viger’s story falling apart under scrutiny, Crown prosecutors could not mount a case against Thibault. His charges were thrown out in 2017. But that wasn’t the end of Thibault’s troubles with the Quebec government. 

Despite the criminal case imploding, Revenu Québec took a run at Thibault’s cheque-cashing business, alleging a small fortune in unpaid taxes. Though he was repeatedly offered to settle for far less than he allegedly owed, Thibault fought the tax agency in court and won.

He is still fighting the provincial government to recover a fortune in assets seized from him. 

“It ruined my life,” Thibault told The Rover. “All we had, in the end, was our children to keep us going, and we were lucky they did. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

One of Thibault’s colleagues rounded up in the Projet Hantise raid, Robert Théroux, isn’t out of the woods yet. 

Théroux and his wife were also charged with conspiracy and money laundering in connection with the SQ’s 2014 investigation. Like Thibault, Théroux ran a cheque-cashing business, giving clients cash up front for their cheques, minus a commission. While these transactions often involve thousands in hard currency, they are legal provided they’re declared to the government.

While the money-laundering charges against Théroux were dropped in 2017, Revenu Québec is pursuing the elderly couple for hundreds of thousands of dollars in allegedly owed taxes. 

Theéroux has drained his life savings, lost all his investments, and the government put a lien on his home. When there was nothing left to seize, the government went after his wife’s assets, properties and retirement savings.

Théroux’s wife, who is in her 70s, ultimately came out of retirement to work at an old folks home so the couple could stay afloat. Now, with a civil trial set for April 26, Théroux must come up with $250,000 for a legal retainer or risk losing his case by default. 

“I have repeatedly asked to meet with them to discuss the differences in our accounting, but each time they’ve said ‘No, you’re a fraudster, see you in court,’” Théroux said. “For years, they’ve been delaying, delaying, delaying, and we’re approaching a situation where we will lose everything without ever having had a chance to defend ourselves in court.”

The concerns raised by Théroux and Thibault were shared by Quebec’s ombudsman, who — in its 2014-2015 annual report — said the tax agency has a history of launching large-scale investigations “based entirely on assumptions.” According to the report, in many cases, taxpayers weren’t allowed to present arguments about the accuracy of their tax assessments. 

Those revelations came after a previous ombudsman’s report warned of “abusive” tax-collecting and investigative practices that were pushing businesses to the verge of bankruptcy. That report, published in 2014, found that the ombudsman had to repeatedly intervene with Revenu Québec, going so far as to “deplore” the agency’s tendency to assume the taxpayer’s guilt without providing evidence to support its claim.

Robert Papineau, a forensic accountant working for Théroux, says Revenu Québec’s entire case rests on bad math and that the investigation was triggered by the testimony of Viger, a proven liar. 

Because Théroux worked closely with Thibault, police believed he was in on a scheme involving fake invoices and a fortune in undeclared cash. But Papineau claims the investigators made a series of basic accounting errors, including at least one case in which they accidentally multiplied an entry in his books by a factor of 10.

“Even the judge told the Crown, ‘You just turned a $40,000 bank statement into $400,000, you’re going to have to explain that.’ And that was just one example,” Papineau said. “This all could have been cleared up with a simple meeting. I found claims from the government that clearly weren’t compared to our bank statements. But I didn’t find the money they say is missing.”

Papineau says the government never provided evidence of wrongdoing because, unlike in criminal law, the burden of proof against the accused is much lower in civil court.

“It turns the whole concept of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ on its head,” said Papineau. “So if we can demonstrate that the assessment is wrong, which I think we have, we should be okay. I haven’t seen any hidden bank accounts. Nowhere in my work, whether it’s the documents I obtained through access to information or discovery, was I able to find any other bank accounts where this extra money is.

“If tomorrow morning it turns out there’s a Swiss bank account, well, show it to me. There’s never been any allusion to anything like that. Otherwise, all I have is the accounts they’ve shown me, and the money just isn’t there.”

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Revenu Québec does not comment on ongoing investigations, but a spokesperson from the tax agency says things are much different now than they were when Thibault and Théroux were arrested. 

The spokesperson said that in response to the ombudsman reports, Revenu Québec adopted the Charter of Taxpayers’ and Mandataries’ Rights, which “places the rights of taxpayers at the heart of our interventions.” The agency also set up a bureau of taxpayers’ rights, in charge of making sure no one’s Charter rights are violated by the state.

In the decade following the Projet Hantise arrests, annual complaints to the ombudsman fell by nearly 70 per cent, from 3,863 to 1,194.

But for Théroux, who says he never imagined spending his retirement years staving off bankruptcy, the damage is already done.

“I don’t have ambitions to be a rich man, we just want to be left alone and to be able to keep what’s rightfully ours,” he said. “I worked my whole life for this and, with a few strokes of a pen, they took it all away.”

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