In summary

There are two elements to the proposal.  First, there needs to be a ramping up of CVITP related services if host organizations are going to be assisted in their efforts to (1) maintain existing service levels; (2) expand existing service levels from the traditional tax season to year round; (3) improve the quality of service for existing clients; and (4) address the challenge of assisting previous non-filers.  Second, the CRA should create a separate unit to provide some CVITP services to host organizations and their volunteers which the CRA is not well suited to provide or is presently incapable or unwilling to provide.

Maintaining the status quo of CVITP related services to host organizations means that access to and the quality of service at CVITP clinics will likely continue to remain highly variable and, in some cases, subpar.  Furthermore, host organizations will not be well positioned to take on additional challenges like managing “virtual clinics” and assisting previous non-filers.

Conclusion

We have suggested two ways that the CRA could provide support to host organizations to improve CVITP services for the public.

First, direct financial support could be offered to host organizations through the payment of a fee for each return filed by volunteers affiliated with these organizations.  Second, indirect support could be offered by financing the creation of an independent unit which could take over the CVITP related services that the CRA does not do well, in addition to providing CVITP related services which have not previously been offered.

An additional element that often gets lost in such a discussion is that the bulk of the CVITP service is delivered by volunteers.  The CRA financial support would also ensure that host organizations can continue to provide the community-based infrastructure volunteers need to provide thousands of hours of public service promoting a federal government objective.

The resources required to provide these two forms of financial support are well within the bounds of normal costs for the delivery of such a large program.   Together, they support synergies that either form, alone, could not.  The real question is whether the CRA wants to devote the additional resources to substantially improve CVITP operations or to continue eking out future gains at the full expense of host organizations.

We believe the latter approach is a risky proposition.  It assumes that the maintenance and further growth of the CVITP can be fully managed within the existing arrangement.  The risk is in failing to deliver a service that is essential to meeting the government’s own poverty reduction objectives.

The 2019 tax season offers a good example of this risk.  Although many host organizations with which we are familiar managed to serve their traditional client base, they did so only by putting further strain on their own resources.  It’s equally likely that when the CVITP figures for the 2019 tax year are published by the CRA, the number of clients assisted and the number of returns filed will both show a decline on earlier years.  Given that host organizations are likely to be operating under the same financial and COVID-related public health constraints for the upcoming 2020 tax season, this may result in a similar decline in the CVITP numbers on earlier years.