Posted by & filed under Personal Tax.

Description: The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) wants to do your taxes. That might save you some time and labour, but it doesn’t please everyone. In Britain and France where such a system has been tried, it has delivered some questionable results. And given that a 2017 report by the Auditor General of Canada said that over 50% of the time calls to the CRA were not even answered, it might be fair game to question the idea of the ability of this agency to take on additional responsibilities.

Date:  October 2, 2020

Source:  financialpost.com

Link: https://financialpost.com/opinion/opinion-the-cra-can-barely-answer-phone-calls-now-it-wants-to-do-our-taxes-for-us

 

Discussion points:

1) How much time do you spend each year doing your taxes?

2) Would you be willing to rely on the CRA to do your tax return and let you know the size of your refund or amount owing?

3) Chapter One of Wiley’s Auditing: A Practical Approach, discusses several types of audits that auditors can perform. What type of audit do you think the Office of the Auditor General was conducting when it discovered the problems at the Canada Revenue Agency?

One Response to “CRA wants to do your taxes”

  1. Gabrielle Baker, Esperance, Balewula, Diana Akilian, Alexander F. Bennett

    1) On average it takes us 2-3 hours each year to do our taxes. We use H&R block and another company to do our taxes. This way it is faster and easier so we do not spend too much time doing our taxes.

    2) Yes we would be willing to rely on CRA to do our tax return but the only concern would be the long wait times for calls or the calls never being answered. By letting CRA do our taxes we might not see anybody face to face which could lead to misunderstandings about information on the forms. Because of the pandemic however, it would be a good idea for CRA to do it for us because it decreases the amount of contact that is involved with people going to places like H&R block.

    3) Risk of understating or overstating refunds or amounts payable seeing that they are busy or they don’t answer calls.

    Reply

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