June 12, 2021
With the close of the tax filing season, we did an informal survey of a few of our fellow CVITP volunteers, to get their first impressions of how the tax season went. This included both new as well as returning volunteers. What follows is a summary of what they said as well as our own impressions.
On Clients
“You advised that clients were unlikely to answer calls from a blocked number. Based on prior experience in a public role, I decided to take a chance on calling on my own phone without blocking and giving that number freely for call backs. As I expected, no one abused it at all.”
“In a typical year, I see clients in person. This year and last, almost all of my client contacts were by phone. I used my own phone and blocked my number. I had no difficulty connecting with clients. However, I should note that I talk with clients at appointed times, set up by staff at the host agencies. So, the clients are expecting a call at a certain time from a blocked number.”
When one of us blocked his phone number during calls to clients, none of the clients picked up the phone. And of course, leaving a message but without leaving a phone number was futile. When we used unblocked phones, we too found that clients answered our phone calls and that they did not abuse this confidence.
“Among clients I saw who had CERB income, none seemed very surprised about the impact on their taxes. It seems the word was generally out to expect the impact caused by a lack of any withholding of tax at source.”
We saw a surprising number of clients who had claimed the CERB but were clearly not entitled to it. Given many of these clients were on very low incomes, they will experience serious financial difficulties if asked by the CRA to repay these amounts.
On Host Organizations and Their Volunteers
“It seemed to me that a real constraint on the number of clients who could be served was that this year, volunteers could not interact in person with clients and thus could not help with the initial screening process. Having done document collection/screening in previous years, I am aware that getting the right information down for each person takes time and skilled questions. It will greatly free up staff time once volunteers can take the screening role back.”
“Who does the intake? I’d vote for something between the in-person model – the volunteer asks all the questions – and the intake screening. The latter has the advantage of triaging the cases that are obviously going to be more complicated – cases such as immigrants. However, asking the right questions at intake requires past experience in tax clinics, but that means taking the scarce resource – the tax filers – and using it in a situation where most of the work can be done by someone with less experience.”
“It’s my impression that the people doing the client intake could do with a lot more knowledge of AFR (Autofill My Return). One host organization had about 25 people refuse to sign up because they did not like the idea of AFR. My guess is that few of the people doing client intake have seen AFR in action. Claims from people such as me about how important it is might have been discounted, notwithstanding my description of how, in fact, truly little sensitive information is provided.”
“I volunteer at a host agency where volunteers also do intake. I only file returns and have never done intake. During the data entry process, always live with the client, I always confirm information that was given at intake. That gives me an opportunity to ensure accuracy and informed consent, and do some education with the client. Occasionally, I have encountered difficulties when intake or screening was not done by someone with filing experience.”
Host organizations with a financial empowerment mandate may use tax clinic coordinators who are well versed in tax and benefit issues to do the intake screening of clients. However, tax clinic coordinators from host organizations which do not have any financial empowerment focus may be less aware of some of the finer points of return preparation. (For example, clients may be asked to give an email address given this is a question that is raised in the Ufile software. However, providing an email address is not the same thing as giving consent for the CRA to communicate with the client by email.) This speaks to the issue of the limited resources available for many tax clinics offered by community-based organizations without specific funding for this purpose.
“People who have immigrated to Canada in the year have so many special considerations. Where is the easy-to-find one-stop guidance for them as to what is pro-rated, what they can claim in full, what can’t they get if they were not in Canada for all of 2020, what if children arrived separately?”
“I started this year with more knowledge than most on the topic of immigrants, but in all five cases this year the issues were new and I had to seek guidance and/or confirmation from the CRA, which included very long waits to speak to an agent in their international section.”
“I volunteer at a number of host agencies. Staff at these agencies refer their own clients and I have gotten to know many of the clients over the years. During the pandemic, staff have reviewed consents before I contact the clients, so I haven’t had to deal with the consent issue. However, staff typically don’t vet (and don’t have the skills to vet) tax issues, so I’m on my own if I run into difficulties. Over the years, I’ve worked up a set of solutions to the issues I’ve encountered so far. I wonder if it might be helpful to have volunteers across the country agree to be available to other volunteers who run into an issue they don’t know how to solve.”
Among tax clinic coordinators that we know and work with, we have promoted the idea of greater coordination, both in scheduling appointments (when the face-to-face model could be used) and in the use of experienced volunteers specializing in complicated cases (on whatever the topic) whether to file the returns or to provide advice to other volunteers. However, we have found most tax clinic organizers to be very “territorial”, preferring to work only with their traditional clients and their volunteers.
Given that the preparation of returns under the public health restrictions proved to be more labour intensive than face-to-face clinics, the number of clients assisted may well be like last year i.e. much lower than the 2019 tax season for the preparation of 2018 returns. In a CRA statement to mark National Volunteer Week, we noted that the number of volunteers registered with the CRA is down substantially from 2020. This might also have a bearing on the number of clients who get assisted this year.
On the CRA and its Procedures, Ufile and the Income Tax Act
One tax clinic coordinator from a host organization which does not have funding to support work on client financial empowerment told one of us that she struggled to justify writing up an application for the CRA’s new pilot grant program. She said that the small amount of money she might get if her application were successful had to be weighed against the amount of time involved in preparing the application and getting it approved by her management, time which might be better spent doing other work.
“Over time, so many boutique credits and deductions have been added to the tax system that it is no wonder we all need software to calculate our results, and that inexperienced users miss out on money they could have claimed. And the result of the multiple credits and benefits is that as people earn a little bit more than the very low-income levels, they actually experience a steep increase in their marginal tax rate. How could these undesirable effects be corrected?”
We agree. For example, the Canada Workers Benefit (CWB) falls off rapidly after a relatively low ceiling is passed. (We note that Budget 2021 has introduced changes to make the CWB a bit more generous.)
“I don’t know if volunteers have typically used Autofill My Return (AFR) in the past for face-to-face tax clinics, but if not, I would certainly recommend it in the future. Apart from getting the spelling of the client’s name right (which would certainly be easier face-to-face, when they can write it down or show us a document), it was pretty seamless.”
AFR was first introduced in the 2018 tax season for the 2017 tax year return. It might not have been used much prior to the 2020 tax season. But the COVID related public health restrictions made it an indispensable function. In fact, we believe all volunteers should learn how to use it.
“Every year, I grit my teeth because of the UFile software. I wish the developers would be open to some copy-editing, and making more credits, deductions, and benefits automatic. Tax filers would make fewer errors.”
“One of the updates – which volunteers are required to check for each and every time they use the software – caused my CVITP-specific settings to be over-ridden. This gave rise to a lot of work to get back to having a CVITP-specific version of the software. I later learned by accident that the CVITP Coordinator had known of this problem for at least a couple of weeks, and also knew of a one-click solution that solved the problem. When I contacted the UFile Virtual Support Agent on its web site and raised another problem, I got a very short answer. Again, CRA could require such software problems be notified to CRA and in turn it would communicate the problems and their solutions to the volunteers. I’ve never seen the CRA do this – ever.”
“I’ve experienced problems with the CVITP-specific version being unable to do an AFR because of some mismatch between UFile and the CRA site. I still don’t know exactly what the problem is, but I have seen a lot of complaints about it online. The firm that owns UFile has been aware of the problem since March but clearly has not done anything about it.”
There are a lot of things with the Ufile software which we do not find very intuitive or user friendly. One we have noticed is the use of AFR. Once the volunteer has identified which province the client is resident in, we also believe the software could be designed better to ensure that all of the relevant provincial credits and deductions are readily identified.
“The flexibility of the remote clinic probably had some advantages for both volunteers and clients. So, it might be worth maintain as an option even once face-to-face clinics are possible again.”
We agree. The greater flexibility may improve access to CVITP services for some clients who would have been difficult to reach pre-pandemic. And it also may draw in (and allow for the retention of) some volunteers who experience mobility issues.
“Although I’d prefer to see clients in person, there are some advantages to connecting remotely: no travel required for anyone; folks with mobility issues can get their returns filed easily. So, I can see continuing post-pandemic with remote filing. One downside, though, is the need for technology. I wonder how many clients haven’t been served because they can’t afford the phone or internet service.”
With some of the remote models experimented with during the pandemic, we have noted the heavy reliance on client access to and/or mastery of sophisticated (and sometimes expensive) communications technology. While there may be significant advantages to the use of this technology for communications between the host organization clinic coordinator and their volunteers, we believe communications with the client (whether by the host organization or the volunteer) should be kept as simple as possible to avoid limiting client access to CVITP services on this basis.
What was your CVITP experience like this tax filing season? What lessons do you think could be drawn from your experience?