Like all federal government departments and agencies, each year the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) produces a report for Parliament after the end of the fiscal year.  This report details what the CRA has done with the money Parliament has budgeted for its operations.  This is the only report that parliamentarians and the Canadian public will see that shows what the CRA has done in the last fiscal year to meet its mandate.

This year is no different.  On December 7, 2020, the CRA published online its Departmental Results Report for fiscal year 2019-2020.  In this article, we review what the CRA has to say in the report about the results it is getting with the CVITP and its work on encouraging previous non-filers to file a return in order to access benefits to which they are entitled.  We show that there is remarkably little information.

Although the CVITP was created in 1971, fifty years later it remains next to impossible to tell what the CVITP has achieved in relation to its objective of assisting individuals and families of low and modest incomes to submit their returns and thereby become eligible for a number of benefits and credits introduced by federal, provincial and territorial legislatures aimed at reducing poverty.  The little information that is included suggests a massive failure this year; yet, there is no analysis showing the implications of this failure and how the CRA plans to avoid a similar result in the forthcoming tax season.

This is especially disappointing given that the federal government’s 2018 Poverty Reduction Strategy highlighted the role that the CVITP is supposed to be playing in contributing to reducing poverty across Canada.  We conclude with an observation: if the rest of the information contained in the CRA’s report is anything like what the CRA has included for the CVITP and its non-filer initiative, then Canadians should be seriously concerned about the bases on which parliamentarians are making decisions allocating billions of dollars from the federal budget to finance the CRA’s annual operations.