Category Archives: CRA

Budget 2025: What You Need To Know

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Tabled in Parliament in November, Budget 2025 promises sweeping changes, but how much of it truly reaches Canada’s most vulnerable residents? This article takes a closer look at the measures that matter for low‑income households, from a modest supplemental payment tied to the Canada Disability Benefit to the government’s plans for automatic benefit delivery. It highlights what’s new, what’s missing, and why some of these changes may not work as smoothly as intended.

Budget 2025 did not announce any new funding to replace the Canada Revenue Agency’s pilot grant project which terminated providing support to the CVITP in October 2025.  With automatic filing on the horizon and volunteer shortages looming, this article raises important questions about whether low‑income Canadians will actually see more support—or risk falling through the cracks. Dive in to explore the full implications.

Council Has Too Much Faith in Automatic Filing, Undervalues CVITP

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The National Advisory Council on Poverty’s latest report highlights automatic tax filing as a solution for getting low-income Canadians their benefits.  But use of the services offered through the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) SimpleFile pilot project has been minimal.  Most people relied on traditional service providers, especially the CVITP, to file correctly.  The CRA’s evolving plans for automatic tax filing risk producing similar results.  Many will still turn to the CVITP which assists nearly a million people annually.  Even though the CVITP has serious resource limitations, the CRA is silent on providing further funding.

In all this, the Council has yet to acknowledge the long-standing CVITP, let alone its resource limitations.  This article explores what this omission means for the Council’s credibility and the CRA’s policy.

Will Automatic Tax Filing Live Up To Its Promise?

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Loyal readers know I have been tracking the federal government’s work on automatic tax filing for low-income Canadians ever since it was first announced in the 2020 Speech from the Throne.  After six years of delay, some social policy advocates predict that the announcement by the Prime Minister a few weeks ago will be a game-changer for delivering benefits and reducing poverty.

My own experience as a volunteer with the Canada Revenue Agency’s Community Volunteer Income Tax Program (CVITP), however, leaves me sceptical.  I believe the CRA’s current vision of automatic tax filing is unlikely to deliver the improvements promised – especially for those who have not been filing returns and missing out on benefits.  Here is why.

1The first article in this three-part series, “SimpleFile in 2024 and 2025”, examines the pilot the CRA launched in 2024 and continued to promote in 2025.  This was the CRA’s initial response in the government’s push for automatic tax filing.

As the evidence shows, SimpleFile has been an abysmal failure – despite the CRA’s claims to the contrary.  The evidence speaks for itself – read the article and judge for yourself using the CRA’s own numbers.

2The second article, “Further Experimentation in 2026”, reviews the CRA’s evolving plans, which use the SimpleFile invitation – if not its filing methods – as a pathway toward automatic tax filing.  It’s an interesting development, but one fraught with challenges that may limit adoption of this new form of automatic filing.

Moreover, individuals who have not filed a return in the last two or more years – and are therefore missing benefits – will be excluded.  The CRA is also unlikely to prepare pre-filled returns for past years, even when those years could mean substantial missed benefits.  Individuals will need outside help to prepare and file those returns.

3The third article, “Be Careful What You Wish For in 2027”, looks at the Prime Minister’s recent announcement of a large-scale rollout and considers what may unfold between 2027 and 2029.  The CRA plans to rely heavily on technology to deliver automatic tax filing.  This initiative will likely shift low-income Canadians who already file returns and get benefits from one filing method to another.  By preparing returns itself, the CRA could, in theory at least, bypass intermediaries such as the CVITP.

Yet many individuals already find CRA documentation and correspondence confusing. Many recipients of pre-filled returns will likely turn to trusted sources for help in understanding their pre-filled return and for advice before consenting to the CRA’s filing.

The CVITP is well positioned to provide this support free of charge.  With some 3,500 host organizations and 18,000 volunteers embedded in communities across Canada, it is a trusted network.  This article argues that by adapting the CVITP to help meet these challenges, the CRA could significantly boost adoption of automatic tax filing.

Across the three articles, I argue that by design, the CRA’s automatic tax filing initiative is unlikely to help low-income Canadians who have not been filing returns or receiving benefits.  Yet this was the originally rationale for introducing automatic tax filing.  Given its community roots and more than 50 years of earned trust, the CVITP remains the best option for fulfilling that promise.

CRA Lowballs Its Target For The CVITP In 2025

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In my latest review of the CVITP’s performance, I found that in the 2024 tax season, at best 27% of Canadians living in poverty in 2023 received free CVITP assistance. That leaves a staggering 73% without help.

Where did they turn? Some filed on their own, some paid for costly commercial services, and others likely didn’t file at all — cutting themselves off from the very benefits designed to reduce poverty. Barriers like lack of awareness, limited access to clinics, and overwhelming demand for the service all play a role.

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has long identified the CVITP as its contribution to Canada’s Poverty Reduction Strategy.  Yet since 2022, it has set no real performance targets for assisting more people.  Surprisingly, the CRA’s Departmental Plan for fiscal year 2025-2026 includes one: a promise to increase the number of people helped by 5%.

This article digs into why the CRA’s new target is less ambitious than it looks — and why Canadians concerned about poverty reduction shouldn’t be impressed.

Should The CRA Change Its Income Criteria For Eligible Clients?

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Every host organization uses income ceilings or thresholds to identify the clients it wishes to serve.  In doing this, many host organizations make use of the Canada Revenue Agency’s (CRA) suggested income ceilings.  The implicit assumption is that by using these, the host organization will be targeting those most in need of this free service.  But just how good are the CRA’s suggested income ceilings for this purpose? 

In 2020, I wrote about this issue here.  At that time, I concluded that “Everywhere in Canada, with the exception of the large urban centres, the income ceilings in the CVITP guidelines are above the official poverty line.  As this is a free service being offered to low-income individuals, the income ceilings in the CVITP guidelines should be aligned more closely with the official poverty lines.  In those regions where host organizations are easily able to meet the demand for free CVITP services, there is no concern.  But in those regions where host organizations are unable to meet the demand and must ration CVITP services, host organizations may wish to consider being less generous with the income ceilings they use to define individuals’ and families’ eligibility for their CVITP services.”

Since then, the CRA has not revised its suggested income ceilings.  But inflation has led to successive increases in the official poverty lines across Canada.

I showed that in 2024, at best only 27% of those living in poverty accessed CVITP services.  I showed that in 2023, access by those living in poverty to free CVITP services ranged from a high of 34.3% in New Brunswick to a low of 14% in Ontario.  So, there are unlikely to be any regions in Canada where host organizations are easily able to meet the need if not the demand for these services.

This means that all host organizations should be attentive to the income ceilings they use to identify clients who are living in poverty.  But are the CRA’s current ceilings still the best income criteria to use for selecting those most in need of free CVITP services?  This article explores this question and provides an answer.

How Does The CRA Deal With Money Owed by Clients?

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Have you had a client tell you they didn’t receive the benefits you estimated they were entitled to when you prepared their income tax and benefit return?  In some cases, they might be getting the benefits but just don’t realize it because they haven’t checked their bank account.

But for other clients, they owe money to various creditors.  And in certain instances, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) acts somewhat like a collection agency, withholding the client’s refund and possibly some of their benefits, and redirecting these to the client’s creditor.  The client may not realize they owe this money or, if they do know about the debt, they may not realize the CRA has the legal authority to do this.

In this article, I identify several different kinds of debts that a client might have where the CRA may get involved.  These include income tax arrears, overpayments of federal and provincial or territorial benefits, ineligible COVID-related support, monies owed to other federal departments and provincial or territorial governments, and monies owed because of a court order that has not been respected. 

In some of these cases, it is clear as to how the CRA proceeds.  But in others, it is not because the CRA does not provide clear information on its rules for what it calls “recovery actions”, claiming that these will often depend on the client’s circumstances.

This debt will usually be referred to in the client’s CRA account which you can access using Represent A Client.  This article provides you with information to help you explain to the client any discrepancy between your estimates of the client’s refund and benefits, and what the client gets from the CRA.

Examining the Failure of the CRA’s 5 Year Pilot Project

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The Canada Revenue Agency’s (CRA) pilot project was announced at the beginning of 2021, after the disastrous performance of the CVITP in 2020.  This was the first time the CRA offered financial support to community-based organizations hosting CVITP clinics.  It has now run for four years and is completing its fifth year in the fall of 2025.   This is a three-part series of articles, examining the project to date and what lies ahead.

1The first part, “The Evidence”, assesses the performance of the pilot project after four years (2021-2024) of implementation.  I conclude that the project has failed to meet its most important objective (and the only one for which public information is available) and that the project is a failure which the fifth and final year will be unable to rectify.

This article also offers new financial information that is quite different from what the CRA has previously reported for 2021-2023.  Together with the budget announced for 2024, it demonstrates that the pilot project has proved to be more expensive than originally planned.

2The second article, “Why Did This Happen?”, provides three reasons – the financing formula changed in an untimely way, the financing formula was not generous enough, and the assumption that financing was the main constraint to expansion was dubious – why the pilot project has been a costly failure. 

Given these considerations were known to the CRA toward the end of 2023, the third year of the original pilot, this article speculates as to why the project was extended for a fourth year.

3The third article, “What Next?”, looks at 2025, the fifth year of the pilot project as it has been extended for a second time, and beyond.  It gives different reasons for the second extension of the pilot project.

Finally, this article gives four arguments – failure of the project to achieve its most important objective, the project’s cost, the government’s current budget saving exercise and the priority it attaches to automatic tax filing – why the pilot project is unlikely to be extended yet again, for a sixth year.

CRA Deadline Change Undermines Reliability of “Autofill My Return”

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On February 28, 2025, the CRA announced that it was pushing back the deadline for all T slips issuers to electronically submit their slips until March 7, the end of the first two weeks of the income tax and benefit (ITB) return filing season.  This meant that CVITP volunteers could not depend on the Autofill My Return (AFR) service to reliably provide all a client’s T slips.  Anyone wanting their ITB return done in the first two weeks had to present paper T slips to their return preparer to make sure all their sources of income were declared.  This article argues that this measure undermined the reliability of the AFR function and furthermore, that there were better ways to have implemented this.

CRA Extends Pilot CVITP Grant Project for a Fifth Year

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On February 24, the CRA posted on its CVITP website that it is extending its pilot grant project for a fifth year.  Grants of $5 will be paid for 2020 to 2024 tax year returns filed between June 1, 2024, and May 31, 2025.

The good news is that the CRA has managed to find some money to continue supporting the CVITP for another season.  But this masks some less welcome news.  Learn here what this means for the CVITP and this pilot grant project in the 2025 tax filing season.

Limits to Getting Useful CRA Data on Your Organization’s CVITP clinic

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Host organizations need to collect anonymized client data both to show the impact of their CVITP clinic to their stakeholders and to provide the information needed to improve the CVITP service they are offering.

There are two ways that a host organization can get this data: ask the CRA for it or collect it independently.  Last year, we argued the case for why host organizations should ask the CRA for their anonymized client data.

In this article, we recount our own experience earlier this year of helping some host organizations in our area to ask the CRA for the data.  We outline some lessons we learned from that experience.

While we were successful in getting the CRA to share some of its data, read here about the problems we encountered interpreting this data.  Our experience suggests this approach to getting data would be useful only for a limited number of host organizations.  It provides host organizations with one possible benefit but not the full range of advantages one could expect from the data currently collected by the CRA.  For host organizations that want the full range of advantages from the data, the best approach is to collect it themselves.  Advice on this latter approach will be the subject of a future article.

CRA’s Automatic Tax Filing: Shortcomings of the “SimpleFile” Pilot

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In a series of three articles, we look at three initiatives other than the CVITP that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) seems to be focusing its efforts on to reach low and modest-income Canadian residents.  We show why these initiatives presently show less promise than the CVITP in tackling the fundamental problem of helping a greater percentage of Canada’s impoverished residents access the benefits to which they are entitled.

In the first article of this series, we looked at the CRA’s non-filers benefits letter initiative.  We argued that the results are insignificant, even questionable and bear no comparison with those obtained by the CVITP when it comes to assisting those living in poverty.

In the second article, we looked at SimpleFile by Phone, the CRA’s automated phone service for filing returns which has operated since 2018 under a different name, File My Return.  We concluded that the results are insignificant, especially when compared with those produced by the CVITP.  It is also far less cost efficient in producing results than the CVITP.  Furthermore, we showed why the service does not live up to its stated promise of helping Canadians who have not filed in the past to access their benefits.

In this third article, we look at the CRA’s long awaited pilot for automatic tax filing, SimpleFile, which was launched in July 2024.  Learn here why we think that, unlike its billing, filing a return under this new method is not automatic, the process is not “simple” to complete, this new method will not reach non-filers as originally intended, and the launch of the pilot is not well timed so is likely to perform poorly.

Rebranding “File My Return” as “Simplefile by Phone” Fails to Get Better Results

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In a series of three articles, we look at three initiatives other than the CVITP that the CRA seems to be focusing its efforts on to reach low and modest-income Canadian residents.  We show why these initiatives presently show less promise than the CVITP in tackling the fundamental problem of helping a greater percentage of Canada’s impoverished residents access the benefits to which they are entitled.

In the first article of this series, we looked at the CRA’s non-filers benefits letter initiative.  We argued that the results are insignificant, even questionable and bear no comparison with those obtained by the CVITP when it comes to assisting those living in poverty.

In this second article, we look at SimpleFile by Phone, the CRA’s automated phone service for filing returns which has operated since 2018 under a different name, File My Return.

Learn here why the results are insignificant, especially when compared with those produced by the CVITP.  It is also far less cost efficient in producing results than the CVITP.  Furthermore, we show why the service does not live up to its stated promise of helping Canadians who have not filed in the past to access their benefits. It is important to recognize the limitations of SimpleFile by Phone because, as will be seen in the third article, this is also part of the CRA’s pilot aimed at launching automatic tax filing.

Why We Doubt The CRA’s Results From Its Non-filers Initiative

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In our most recent article on the CVITP’s coverage of the impoverished in Canada, we concluded that the CVITP remains a very effective program for helping those on low and modest incomes to file their income tax and benefit returns, thereby getting the benefits to which they are entitled.  We also noted that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) should redouble its efforts to expand the CVITP as most Canadian residents living in poverty still do not benefit from this free service.

Yet we noted that post-pandemic, the CRA appears to have scaled back its ambitions for the CVITP.  The CRA no longer sets any targets for reaching more clients. Presently, it is unclear what its goals for and commitments are to this program.

Instead, the CRA seems to be focusing its efforts on reaching Canadian residents on low and modest incomes through three other initiatives: non-filers benefits letter initiative, SimpleFile by Phone (formerly File My Return) and the piloting of automatic tax filing.

In a series of three articles, we show why these three initiatives presently show less promise than the CVITP in tackling the fundamental problem of helping a greater percentage of Canada’s impoverished residents access the benefits to which they are entitled.

In this first article, we look at what the CRA calls its “non-filers benefits letter initiative” which it has operated for the last seven years to encourage non-filers to submit a return. 

Learn here why the results are insignificant, even questionable and bear no comparison with those obtained by the CVITP when it comes to assisting those living in poverty.

The CVITP’s 2023 Coverage of the Impoverished in Canada

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In the 2022 tax season, the CVITP served only 28% of those living in poverty in 2021.  The poverty rate in Canada rose from 7.4% in 2021 to 9.9% in 2022.  What percentage of the 3,037,000 adults living in poverty in 2022 were served by the CVITP in the 2023 tax season?  Read this article to find out more.  Also learn about why we think the Canada Revenue Agency should be doing a lot more to expand the CVITP yet does not seem willing to do so.

The Evolution of the CVITP – 2023 Update

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Each year, we present and analyze the Canada Revenue Agency’s data to show how the CVITP is evolving.  Using the CRA’s 2023 data, we review the most recent trends in the numbers of people assisted and returns filed as well as in the value generated (results from CVITP service delivery), in the numbers of volunteers and host organizations recruited and retained (CVITP infrastructure supporting service delivery), and in measures of productivity for CVITP service delivery.  We also identify two positive and two negative factors which could affect CVITP productivity in the future.  Read the summary of our findings as well as the full articles (with data tables and graphs) on service delivery, infrastructure and productivity.

*Watch for a new feature that we will be publishing in the coming months on the Evolution of the CVITP!