April 11, 2025
This is the second article in a four-part series entitled The Evolution of the CVITP – 2024 Update. This article focuses on what I 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, I believe this figure is misleading as it likely 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. I 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.
So perhaps it is more realistic to use the 2019 tax season as the peak for registration of host organizations. Since then, the number of host organizations has only very slowly rebounded. As of 2024, it had still not reached the number attained in the 2019 tax season, prior to the pandemic.
The CRA’s pilot grant project aimed to increase host organization by 5% each year. As can be seen from the table above, it failed to do this. The financial incentives offered in the first four years of the pilot grant project (2021 to 2024) 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).
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, I 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, I assume that one person per host organization is staff and not a volunteer in the sense I mean. (This is a conservative assumption: in some cases, it could be more than one staff person.)
There is another phenomenon that may also result in an overreporting of volunteers. 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. I do not correct for this as I have no way of knowing how widespread this phenomenon is. I am also unsure if the CRA corrects for this in its own counting.
The table numbers above and the bar chart below reveal trends somewhat similar to what was found with the CVITP’s results from delivering service to clients: the numbers of volunteers, whether using the CRA’s own numbers for CVITP volunteers or my “adjusted volunteer estimate” (AVE), rose gradually between 2017 and 2019 and then dropped in 2020 with further declines in 2021 and 2022. The numbers have been rising again since 2023. But there is still some way to go before they rise to the peak seen in the 2019 tax filing season, just prior to the pandemic.
The average AVE per host organization suggests that host organizations are making good headway with volunteer recruitment after bottoming out in 2022 but that they are still short of the numbers reached in the 2017-2019 period.
To read about the most recent trends in productivity within the CVITP, see Part 3 – 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.)