September 5, 2024
This is the second article in a four-part series entitled The Evolution of the CVITP – 2023 Update. This article focuses on what we call the infrastructure supporting the delivery of services to CVITP clients, using data published by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).[i]
Host organizations
**https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/news/2021/01/new-support-for-organizations-hosting-free-tax-clinics.html
DRR = Departmental Results Report; all CRA DRRs can be found here
CRA CVITP webpage for statistics can be found here
The number of host organizations peaked in the 2020 tax season. However, we believe this figure is misleading. It represents the number of host organizations that were registered to offer CVITP service at the outset of the 2020 tax season. As COVID health restrictions were introduced mid season, in-person clinics were shut down. We believe most host organizations shut their doors and only a small number chose to offer virtual clinics during the remainder of the 2020 tax season.
Since then, the number of host organizations has declined. Especially worrying is that, despite the introduction of the CRA’s pilot grant project which is intended to increase the number of host organizations offering CVITP services, the number stagnated in 2023. The financial incentives offered in the three years of the pilot grant project (2021 to 2023) do not appear to have been sufficient to restore the number of host organizations which operated prior to the pandemic (a period when no financial incentives were being offered).
If the CRA wants to expand the reach of the CVITP, what other strategies is it planning to use to increase the number of CVITP host organizations?
Volunteers
**https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/news/2021/01/new-support-for-organizations-hosting-free-tax-clinics.html
DRR = Departmental Results Report; all CRA DRRs can be found here
CRA CVITP webpage for statistics can be found here
The CRA counts anyone who works on the CVITP as a volunteer. This includes the staff from host organizations who work on their CVITP clinics as part of their job. However, we use the term “volunteer” here to mean only those individuals who work on the CVITP for no remuneration. This latter group is smaller than the total number of volunteers reported on by the CRA, although by how much is unclear. What is clear is that the number of host organizations registered significantly affects this figure.
To partially offset the distorting effect of counting staff as volunteers, we assume that one person per host organization is staff and not a volunteer in the sense we mean. (We believe this is a conservative assumption. In some cases, it could be more than one.)
From our own prior experience, we note another phenomenon that results in an overreporting of volunteers. We find that some newly registered CVITP volunteers do not do any filing in their first year as they run into problems getting their EFile and RepID approvals or in using the UFile software. We do not correct for this as we have no way of knowing how widespread this phenomenon is.
Whether using the CRA’s own numbers for CVITP volunteers or our adjusted volunteer estimate (AVE), the volunteer numbers rose modestly in 2023 after bottoming out in the 2022 tax season. This is a good sign. But there is still a long way to go before they rise to the levels seen in the years prior to the pandemic. This remains a problem. The CRA needs to work aggressively on volunteer recruitment and retention if it wants to expand the reach of the CVITP.
The AVE per host organization suggests that host organizations are starting to modestly increase their volunteer numbers after bottoming out in the 2022 tax season.
To read about the most recent trends in productivity within the CVITP, see Part Three – CVITP Service Productivity.
[i] Prior to 2021, we used several CRA data sources as the CRA did not offer comprehensive CVITP data in any one publication. Recently, the CRA started providing data from 2021 onwards on its CVITP webpages. The new data uses a different annual time frame for collecting and reporting on the CVITP from the time frame the CRA previously used. This creates a discontinuity between the data we cited before 2021 and the new data. However, we do not believe the new data time frame creates a significant change in the trends observed. Therefore, we have replaced the old data we cited by the new data starting with the year 2021. (For more information, see Great CRA Innovations: Annual Data on CVITP Results.)