October 13, 2022

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In August 2021, we produced an early edition covering the evolution of the CVITP in 2021.  We encourage readers to review that article before reading this one (as we raise several issues there which we will not repeat here).

We called it an early edition as we did not want to wait for the Canada Revenue Agency’s (CRA) Departmental Results Report for the fiscal year 2020-2021, the usual source of figures on the CVITP, to be published.  The fall election in 2021 interrupted the timely publication of all the federal government departments and agencies’ Departmental Results Reports.  When we published the early edition, we promised to provide the updated figures once the CRA’s Departmental Results Report was published.  It was only published online at the beginning of February 2022.

Like our previous articles tracking the evolution of the CVITP, we try to provide figures for four items: clients served, returns filed, volunteers involved and host organizations providing the service.  However, the CRA does not consistently report figures for all four of these items, making it difficult to track the CVITP’s progress.  The table below illustrates the problem:

Misleading or missing numbers

The 2021 figure of 582,240 clients served is the most likely one as the time frame (May 16, past year to May 15, current year) is consistent with previous reporting by the CRA in its Departmental Results Reports.  This represents a 43% increase from 2020.  This is a healthy rebound after the disastrous 2020 tax season.  But it is still well below the peak figure of 741,400 which was achieved in 2019.

Unfortunately, the CRA does not provide any figure for the 2021 number of returns filed.  We only know that it is something greater than the number of clients served.  This is because it includes not only the returns for the most recent tax year but also prior years’ returns that were filed for some clients during the 2021 tax season.  (Between 2016 and 2019, when figures were reported for the numbers of returns filed and clients served, the number of returns exceeded the number of clients, consistently rising from 8.3% in 2016 to 12.6% in 2019.)

On host organizations providing CVITP services, the CRA’s Departmental Results Report for 2020-2021 states that:

“The CRA continued to support community organizations and volunteers participating in the Community Volunteer Income Tax Program (CVITP) and the Income Tax Assistance program in Quebec to implement and host 427 virtual clinics to assist eligible clients file their income tax and benefit returns.” 

The figure of 427 virtual clinics represents a spectacular decline from 2020 when 3,810 host organizations were reported by the CRA as participating in the CVITP.

We think the figure for host organizations the CRA reported for the 2020 tax season (3,810) is misleading.  It probably included all host organizations registered with the CRA at the outset of the tax season.  After the COVID health restrictions were introduced in mid-March 2020 and host organizations had to stop providing in-person CVITP clinics, probably only a very small percentage managed to shift to providing CVITP virtual clinics.  The figure of 427 host organizations in the 2021 tax season may actually represent an increase over the number of host organizations which pivoted to provide CVITP virtual services in 2020…but we will never know this with any certainty.

The figure for volunteers is only reported once, in April of 2021, but can probably be used as it was likely based on the number of volunteers registered with the CRA at the beginning of the tax season and thus was unlikely to change much after April when it was published.  As we noted in our early edition, “The decline in the number of volunteers registered for the CVITP, for the second year in a row, is worrisome.”

Nevertheless, we think the figures for volunteers reported for the 2020 tax season (18,960) and the 2021 tax season (14,200) are misleading, for different reasons.  After the COVID health restrictions were introduced in mid-March 2020 and host organizations had to stop providing in-person CVITP clinics, probably only a fraction of the reported number of volunteers continued to provide income tax and benefit return preparation services in CVITP virtual clinics.

The figure reported for the 2021 tax season (14,200), when combined with the figure of host organizations for the 2021 tax season (427) yields an average of 33 volunteers preparing returns for each host organization.  This just does not sound right.  This is because the average number of volunteers preparing returns at host organizations varied between five and six in the previous four tax season.

Where, then, did the CRA get the figure of 14,200 from?  We are not entirely sure, but we strongly suspect this represents the number of volunteers who initially registered with the CRA for the tax season.  However, it is important to make the distinction between a volunteer who is registered and one who is also active in filing one or more returns.

There are several possible reasons why the number of active volunteers was likely significantly less than the number registered. Some registered volunteers probably could not find a host organization that was offering a virtual clinic in their area.  (Indeed, some may have assumed they were going to return to the same host organization they had volunteered with in previous years only to discover it was not offering a virtual clinic, given the additional workload running such a clinic involves over traditional in-person clinics.)  Other registered volunteers may have found a clinic to work at but then, for various reasons, were unable to become active.

Conclusion

We consider the CRA’s annual Departmental Results Report the gold standard for CRA reporting because the report is submitted to Parliament.  Even then, data on all four elements – clients, returns, volunteers and host organizations – is hard to come by.  And it is increasingly difficult for Parliament, the public and those directly involved in making the CVITP a reality to know what’s happening.

The CRA Departmental Results Report for fiscal year 2021-2022 should be published shortly.  When it is, we will provide an update on the figures for the 2022 tax season.  The only figure we can be sure the CRA will report on is the number of clients served as it is the only figure the CRA has committed to publish in its Departmental Results Reports.

However, as we noted in our article Missing In Action: No Future CRA Reporting on CVITP Results, the CRA has indicated it will no longer provide any figures for the CVITP in its Departmental Results Reports starting next year.  We give four reasons in our article why we think the CRA’s plan to stop providing information on the CVITP will prove to be a big problem.