April 11, 2025
In this third article of a four-part series entitled The Evolution of the CVITP – 2024 Update, I combine data from Part 1 (Results from Delivering CVITP Service to Clients) and Part 2 (Infrastructure Supporting CVITP Service Delivery) to generate figures that offer a picture of some basic productivity trends within the CVITP.
Volunteers
For the two measures of volunteer productivity, I make use of the adjusted volunteer estimate or AVE. As explained in Part 2 – Infrastructure Supporting CVITP Service Delivery, the AVE is a crude but useful way of providing a more accurate estimate of the number of real volunteers – excluding host organization staff – who are preparing and filing returns for clients. To do this, I estimate one person per host organization is staff and accordingly, I reduce the CRA’s count of volunteers by a similar number to get the AVE.
There are also people registered as volunteers who greet clients or do other administrative tasks but who do not file returns. I do not make any adjustment for these volunteers. (When registering as a CVITP volunteer, the CRA asks the volunteer to indicate which role they will take up, as clinic administrator, receptionist or return preparer. So the CRA has the breakdown of the volunteer numbers by role. But it does not publish these figures.) I also do not make any adjustment for newly registered volunteers who end up, for various reasons, not volunteering during their first tax season.
Thus, my AVE may still be an inflated estimate of the number of volunteers who are preparing and filing returns. If so, this would mean I understate below the average numbers of individuals assisted and returns filed per volunteer tax preparer. In other words, it may be that a typical volunteer assists more individuals and files more returns than my averages below suggest.
What do the estimates for the two productivity measures for volunteers show? Between 2017 and 2019, these were in modest decline. Then, in the 2020 return filing period, these declined dramatically. Following 2020, the measures rebounded and reached a new peak in the 2023 period. This means that each CVITP volunteer tax preparer was on average doing more work than ever before, assisting more individuals and filing more returns. In the 2024 return filing period, the two averages declined modestly from the peaks reached in 2023. The significant increase in volunteer numbers in 2024 explains why their average productivity figures declined marginally in 2024.
Host organizations
What do the estimates for the two productivity measures for host organizations show? After 2017, both productivity on both measures declined until 2020. Thereafter, they rebounded steadily and in the 2024 return filing period, they surpassed the peaks previously achieved in 2017. Although the number of host organizations increased only marginally in 2024, the substantial increase in the number of volunteers explains how host organizations were able to increase their average productivity figures yet again.
What does all of this mean for the evolution of the CVITP in 2025? See Part 4 – Looking Ahead to 2025.