Category Archives: Data

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.

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!

Using Municipal Poverty Data to Better Target CVITP Service

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In a previous article, we argued that the CVITP is not serving enough of Canada’s poor.  In that article, we looked only at the national picture.  Under the most generous assumptions, we determined that the CVITP served at best only one in every five poor people in Canada.

In this article, we look briefly at 2020 provincial and territorial level data (the most recent year available) to establish CVITP coverage (again, using a very generous assumption).  Our estimates reconfirm that CVITP service to the poor remains surprisingly low across Canada (with the lower populated regions doing a comparatively better job).

Given the CVITP’s very limited delivery capacity, we believe that the best way to serve more of the poor is with better targeting.  But to do this effectively, host organizations need poverty data at the local level.  By this we mean both reaching out to specific groups to encourage them to use the service and greater selectivity in whom the service is provided to.

A new Statistics Canada website where poverty data for most Canadian municipalities can be found offers the CRA and host organizations the information needed to devise strategies to improve access to CVITP services for those who need it the most.  But we argue it is unclear whether either group has the will to make this happen.

How Many People Failed to File a 2021 Return?

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This is the first article in a three-part series.  This article argues that, while the number of current non-filers may not be as large as some popular estimates, the number is still very large and represents a serious drag on the federal government’s poverty reduction objectives.

Robson and Schwartz estimate 10-12% of Canadian residents eligible to file a return failed to do so in 2015.  While this estimate continues to circulate in the media today, other estimates suggest the non-filer rate has fallen significantly since then.  Using one of the more intuitive methods employed by Robson and Schwarz, we estimate that the non-filer rate had dropped to around 4.8% by 2021.  However, this still means that approximately 1.5 million Canadian residents eligible to file a return failed to do so in 2021.  As most of these were low-income residents, many missed claiming federal and provincial or territorial income-tested benefits designed to reduce poverty.  Getting these residents to file a return will be key to meeting the federal government’s objectives laid out in its 2018 Poverty Reduction Strategy.

The next two articles will propose elements of a strategy whereby the CRA could make more effective use of the CVITP to reduce the number of non-filers, making an important contribution to poverty reduction.

One Way to Get Useful Data on Your CVITP Clinic: Ask the CRA for it

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We have previously made the case for host organizations to collect and analyse data from their CVITP clinics to demonstrate the impact of their work to stakeholders and to improve their clinics in future years.  There are two ways to get this data: the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) could provide it or host organizations could collect it themselves.  In this article, we look at the first of these methods, showing how the CRA could and why it should provide the data.

But even if the CRA could and should provide the data to participating organizations, the CRA may not do this on its own initiative.  Host organizations are going to have to ask the CRA for the data.  To make it easier for them to do this, we provide a template of a letter which can be used or modified and sent to the CRA.  To get commitment from senior managers within the host organization who may be less familiar with the subject, we also provide a background note that a CVITP clinic coordinator can use internally to brief them.

If a host organization thinks it is a good idea, now is the time to send in this letter.  It will give the CRA ample time to plan for any changes in practice before the 2024 tax season.

However, we are not naïve in believing that the CRA would do this just because a handful of host organizations ask for it.  As it represents an important change in institutional practice, it will likely require a sustained letter writing campaign over the longer term by many host organizations to convince the CRA to make the technical, demographic, economic and benefit-related data available to each of its participating organizations for the CVITP service they are providing and the populations they are serving.

In the short term, what does a host organization do to get the data it needs to improve its CVITP service and to demonstrate the impact of this service?  This will be the subject of a forthcoming article.

Great CRA Innovations: Annual Data on CVITP Results

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The CRA recently published a new feature on its CVITP website called “Free tax clinic statistics”.  This feature includes annual data on individuals assisted, returns filed, volunteers and host organizations as well as the value of the entitlements generated by filing returns.  It provides this data at the national level as well as by province and territory, something that was rarely seen before.  This is a very welcome development!

While the website only gives data for 2021 and 2022, we hope the CRA will update this feature in future years without losing the historical data.  Considering this new feature, we list four concerns below, in order of priority, from least to most important:

  1. A change in the timeframe for data collection, shifting from May 16 of the previous year to May 15 of the current year, over to January 1 to December 31 of the same year.  The data for 2021 (January 1 to December 31) are remarkably similar to the data reported for what was previously 2022 (May 16, 2021, to May 15, 2022).   The data for 2022 (January 1 to December 31) leads to only one change in our previous assessment of six trends revealed in CVITP data:  the numbers of individuals assisted and returns completed rose by 13% and 15% respectively in 2022 whereas the old data suggested stagnating performance.
  2. Reporting on the value of the refund, benefit and credit entitlements generated each year for CVITP clients.  The total is for the federal and provincial/territorial refund, credit, and benefits administered through the CRA.   A further breakdown of what is included would provide for greater transparency and understanding.  We give several reasons why we think the amount reported is a very conservative underestimation.
  3. While the subnational figures are of passing interest, host organizations are keen to get the information on the value of the refunds, credits and benefit entitlements for the clients they have served in their own CVITP clinics.  This demonstrates the relevance of their work to senior management within their host organizations and to their local communities.  It also helps to buttress their requests to donors for funding support.  The introduction of the CVITP Organization Identification Number or COIN in 2021 (for 2020 and subsequent year returns) now makes this possible.
  4. While the CRA data are useful, the results do not really get at the main purpose of the CVITP.  (We show why here.)  The CRA should track and report against more relevant results, which will help it to focus limited CVITP resources, especially its volunteers, on providing CVITP services to those who need these the most.

This article provides the numbers and more detail on the concerns listed above.

How To Coordinate CVITP Clinics, Why It Isn’t Happening And Why It Should

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We work as CVITP volunteers in a large urban area.  At the height of the tax season, in March and April, there are over 40 host organizations offering CVITP clinics in our area.  Yet they do not coordinate their CVITP efforts between themselves.  We suspect this is true in many urban centres.  Why?

In this article, we give nine examples to illustrate some of the ways in which CVITP host organizations can coordinate by pooling clients, volunteers and information.

We then explore the question of why this doesn’t happen more often.  In a nutshell, many host organizations feel they cannot afford the costs, in the short term, to closer collaboration.  Ideally, the CRA’s regional coordinators could take on the role of leading coordination efforts amongst host organizations within their regions, helping to overcome some of these costs.  However, given the CRA’s generally cautious approach to the CVITP, we do not see this happening anytime soon.

Yet we know that there are cases of closer collaboration between host organizations, even if infrequent.  We offer up the intriguing example of Aspire Calgary to show how 18 host organizations have managed to closely collaborate on a range of activities related to the CVITP, from training to fundraising.  Working together, they have managed to produce impressive results in support of Calgary’s poverty reduction strategy: in 2019, their 572 volunteers filed 8,797 returns in 325 clinics which generated $43 million in government benefits for people on low incomes.  We briefly outline three notable features of Aspire Calgary’s model which support this collaboration.

Such cases demonstrate that some organizations are willing to incur the short-term costs associated with better collaboration.   Why?  We believe it is because they have realized that the short-term costs are outweighed by the benefits over the medium term.  Chief amongst these benefits is better client service: more clients can be assisted; they can be assisted by volunteers who better understand their particular circumstances and the service can be offered on a more flexible basis.

Finally in our article, we set out a challenge in 2023 for host organizations who are willing to take the first step toward closer collaboration with others in their region.  We propose volunteer training, an area we find to be neglected at many host organizations we know and an important element for improving service to clients.

Collecting and Analyzing Data to Improve Service and Demonstrate Impact

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When personal information is stripped from client returns and the remaining information is aggregated, a host organization can make at least two uses of the ensuing data.  It can use the demographic and economic data to learn more about the population currently served and to improve targeting efforts in the design of future tax clinics.  The host organization can also use data on the benefits and credits generated for clients to demonstrate to its various stakeholders the impact of the current CVITP service on their clients’ financial situations.

Annually, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) strips the personal information from returns and provides the demographic and economic data to Statistics Canada for publication.  Infrequently, the CRA has also aggregated the data from returns on benefits and credits at the national and provincial levels and shared the figures publicly.  Given the advent of the CVITP Organization Identification Number or COIN in 2021, it is now technically feasible for the CRA to do all this for each individual host organization as well.

There are two reasons why we believe it is in the CRA’s own interest to do this.  First, by providing data to individual host organizations on the benefits and credits generated by their CVITP clinics for their clients, the CRA would be helping them to make the case to donors.  Increased donor funding would alleviate a serious resource constraint for many host organizations.  In turn, this could reduce some of the pressure on the CRA to provide funding while, at the same time, increase client access to CVITP services.

Second, by obtaining demographic and economic data on the clients served by its CVITP service, the host organization can learn more about the population currently benefiting from its CVITP service.  Where there is a mismatch between this data and the population the host organization wishes to serve, this information can be used to help better target CVITP services in the next tax season.  In turn, this could increase access to CVITP services by clients who need these the most.

In both instances, the provision of data to host organizations could help the CRA to better contribute to meeting the objectives of the federal government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS).

Quite apart from doing this to fulfill its obligation to support the government’s PRS, we believe the CRA has an obligation, as a good partner, to provide its host organizations with their data.  Currently, most host organizations offer CVITP clinics with little or no support from the CRA.  Providing this data would be one of the most important contributions the CRA could make to help its host organizations.

Although the CRA does not presently do this, some host organizations are collecting and analyzing client data from their CVITP clinics.   However, most are not.  This article explores five challenges host organizations face in doing this:

  • A lack of interest or understanding within the host organization about the importance of this data
  • Addressing client consent considerations
  • Handling client privacy issues
  • Finding staff or volunteer time to collect the data
  • Finding the expertise to analyze the data

Our experience is that host organizations mandated to promote their clients’ financial empowerment are the most successful at present in addressing these challenges.  As they already receive donor funding in support of this mandate, they are well positioned to tackle these challenges.

On the other hand, most host organizations providing CVITP services do not have clients’ financial empowerment as part of their core mandate.  Thus, they probably do not receive donor funding specifically to support their CVITP services.

One final reflection: our article addresses the use of anonymized data found in client returns.  To improve on the delivery of their CVITP services, host organizations also need to find ways to get data on non-filers within their potential client base.

CRA Data and Analysis Suggestions for a More Effective CVITP Strategy

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As mentioned in a previous article, one priority in her Supplementary Mandate Letter from the Prime Minister (dated January 2021) instructs the Minister of National Revenue to “enhance and expand the Community Volunteer Income Tax Program”.  One thing the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) can do to help achieve this is through placing greater emphasis on another priority mentioned in the same letter, instructing Minister Lebouthillier to “improve the collection and analysis of disaggregated data related to supports and services offered by the CRA.”

Data needs to be collected and analyzed for at least two reasons.  First, to confirm whether or not the CVITP is meeting its intended objective.  And second, where the CVITP is falling short of its intended objective, to help devise strategies to ensure the program can better meet its intended objective.

We think the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) currently has two related problems with respect to CVITP data.  First, it collects the wrong data and publishes too little of what it does collect.  Second, this means the CRA focuses on doing the wrong things.

In this two-part series of articles, we look at data and its use in formulating strategy.

In the first article, entitled “First, the CRA Needs to Collect and Analyze the CORRECT Data”, we examine the data that is collected and analyzed on clients and their returns.  We begin with the uncontroversial observation that data needs to be collected and analysed to confirm whether or not the CVITP is meeting its intended objective.  We then refer to a previous article in which we argued that the CRA presently collects and reports CVITP results data which are not aligned with the purpose and in which we offered alternative performance indicators which we believe do a better job of this.  We also look at the data the CRA currently collects on CVITP host organizations and volunteers – what we call the delivery infrastructure – and make some modest suggestions for additional data to be collected through the annual registration process just prior to the tax season.

In the second article, entitled “Then, the CRA Needs to Build a Strategy With a Focus on Improving EFFICIENCY”, we look at how all this data can be used to devise strategies to ensure the CVITP can better meet its intended objective.  The combination of analyses of data on CVITP results and delivery infrastructure can help to inform the choice of actions to be taken.  The strategic priority we focus on is increasing the number of CVITP clients.  We argue that the CRA should place greater emphasis on increasing efficiencies within the existing delivery infrastructure over increasing the size of the delivery infrastructure.  A few examples are offered to illustrate how data on results and delivery infrastructure could be used to do this.