For a program that has existed in one form or another since 1971, one would expect there to be lots of information readily available about its evolution. However, we have discovered this is not the case.
The main sources of information on the CVITP are the Canada Revenue Agency’s (CRA) annual Departmental Plans and Results Reports to Parliament. Up until a few years ago, these provided no information on the CVITP. More recently, the reports have provided some information, but sparsely and not in a consistent manner. So we have had to do a bit of detective work to piece together a coherent story about the recent evolution of the CVITP.
There are four main elements to this story: clients, returns, volunteers and host organizations. Low-income Canadians are the target clients of the CVITP. The immediate aim of the CVITP is to prepare and submit these clients’ annual income tax and benefit returns to the CRA. The task of preparing clients’ returns is handled by CVITP volunteers authorized by the CRA to prepare and submit clients’ returns to the CRA. These volunteers are recruited and hosted by local community-based organizations which have been authorized by the CRA to run CVITP tax clinics.
We will examine the evolution of each of these elements separately.
A short digression: Which year are we talking about?
Tax year, calendar year, fiscal year. All are different but relevant to the discussion. It is important to know which year is being discussed to avoid confusion when looking at the data and their sources.
The tax year comes first. In the example in our figure, we use 2018.
Income tax and benefit returns are usually collected in the spring of the following calendar year. So, for example, data for the 2018 tax year were collected in the spring of 2019 when returns were filed for 2018.
The deadline for filing tax and benefit returns is usually at the end of April. This means the regular tax season runs from March 1st to April 30th. As the federal government’s fiscal year ends on March 31st, the tax season spans the end of the old fiscal year and the beginning of the new. To use the same example above, March and April 2019 made up the regular tax season which spanned the end of the 2018/19 fiscal year (April 1, 2018 to March 31, 2019) and the start of the 2019/20 fiscal year (April 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020).
Sometime after the tax filing deadline has passed, the CRA will publish its Departmental Results Report for the old fiscal year. This report will include information on the performance of the CVITP for that tax season. To return once again to the same example, information on the CVITP for the 2018 tax year was included in the Departmental Results Report covering the 2018-19 fiscal year.
Read the first section, entitled The Evolution of the CVITP – Clients, in which we look at what the CRA has documented about the families and individuals assisted by the CVITP.