February 8, 2021
Conclusion – how will the CRA know if this pilot project is successful?
The grant program is created in recognition of the fact that host organizations incur substantial costs to run free tax clinics and that the CRA intends to help them with these costs. How will we know if it has been successful? The News Release is the only place where the ultimate goal of the pilot project is made explicit:
“The CRA expects that the grant program will make the work for these free tax clinics a little easier and encourage more organizations to sign up. This will let them help more taxpayers to file their tax returns.”
As can be seen from our first section on targeting, “more organizations signed up” and “more taxpayers filing” are not the right criteria by which to judge the success of the CVITP. Given more generous financial resources and a more streamlined administrative arrangement, grant funding has the potential to significantly increase the CVITP’s impact as per its purpose.
However, the current pilot project is very unlikely to do so.
Furthermore, the CRA will struggle to make a convincing case that its pilot project will have contributed to the stated objectives of “more organizations signed up” and “more taxpayers filing”. Key to determining its success will be the answer to the question “more than what?”
To make a convincing case that the pilot project has been successful, it will be necessary to distinguish between the natural growth, from year to year, in the numbers of host organizations registered and clients served, and the growth that is specifically due to the incentive effect of the pilot project. As most researchers know, this can be challenging to do even in normal times (“other things being equal”).
But these are not normal times. As we show elsewhere, interpretations of the 2020 numbers of host organizations and clients served are problematic due to the effects of COVID related public health restrictions on CVITP operations. The same will very likely apply to the numbers for 2021, the first year of the pilot, as the COVID related restrictions will still be in place. It is still unclear what 2022 and 2023 are likely to look like. As this is only a three-year pilot, researchers will find it difficult to establish what the natural growth in numbers would be during the 2021-2023 year period before disaggregating these numbers from the growth in numbers due to the incentive effect of grant funding.
One must hope that the CVITP will recover from its poor performance in 2020 and grow in the 2021-2023 period. However, there is a risk that any growth in the numbers will be claimed as demonstrating the success of the pilot and used to justify maintaining this project in its current form beyond the three- year period of the pilot.
The weaknesses in the CRA’s pilot project are, unfortunately, consistent with what we consider to be the central problem – the CRA continues to be blind to the connection between its core responsibility with respect to the administration of the Benefits Program and the federal government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy – which is reflected in the CRA’s weak results framework and its reporting on the CVITP. Only once the CRA recognizes the important role its administration of the Benefits Program plays in contributing to reducing poverty in Canada will it reorient this pilot, its results framework and its reporting on the CVITP program to be consistent with this role.
