August 18, 2024

Summary: Over the last three years, we’ve visited CVITP host organizations in six cities spanning five provinces.  At the risk of overgeneralizing, we see broadly two types of host organizations.

There is a relatively small number of CVITP host organizations whose objectives go well beyond the preparation and submission of returns to include building their clients’ financial knowledge.  These organizations tend to receive both private and public donor funds to support this work, operate year round and serve a much larger number of clients than the average CVITP clinic, and clinic organizers receive strong support from their management.

And then there is the majority of CVITP host organizations which offer a range of other social services to their clients in addition to this service or focus on providing CVITP services to a specific ethnic or religion-based community.  However, neither of these latter organizations prioritizes promoting the broader objective of empowering their clients financially.  They tend to have little or no dedicated in-house funding for running their CVITP clinics, offer these services only in March and April and serve a relatively smaller number of clients during this period.  Responsibility for organizing CVITP clinics usually falls to one staff person who additionally has other client service or program-related responsibilities.  They also do not tend to be especially knowledgeable about tax and benefit issues relevant to their low-income clients.

This means the CRA is heavily reliant on organizations with a more limited financial mandate and weaker capacity to reach most residents that need to be served by the CVITP.  If the CRA wants the CVITP both to recover to the levels seen in 2019 and to expand further in the coming years, it will need to play a much stronger role in providing support to these organizations and their volunteers.

In addition to making its pilot grant program a regular feature of the CRA’s support to the CVITP, the CRA should also be investing money upfront to build the capacity of host organizations which do not have a financial empowerment objective to offer CVITP services.

One way to do this could be to provide additional financial resources to some CVITP host organizations with a financial empowerment objective and the willingness to use their staff and expertise to support CVITP capacity building in their region.  These designated CVITP host organizations would use CRA resources to help other CVITP host organizations in their area with efforts to recruit, train, supervise and use increasingly scarce volunteer resources, and to collect, analyze and aggregate client data to demonstrate impact.

Over the past three years, one of us has combined personal travel with visits to select CVITP host organizations in Victoria, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax.  In total, fourteen community-based organizations offering CVITP clinics were visited.  What follows are some general observations distilled from these visits.  We caution that these observations should not be generalized to host organizations in all cities and towns, still less to host organizations in rural areas.

As we have observed in previous articles, CVITP host organizations are generally one of two types.

Host organizations with a financial empowerment objective

In each of the six cities we visited, there is a relatively small number of CVITP host organizations whose objectives go beyond the preparation and submission of returns to include building their clients’ financial knowledge.  These organizations tend to receive both private and public donor funds to support this work, operate year round and serve a much larger number of clients than the average CVITP clinic.

As CVITP services fall squarely within these organizations’ objectives, their clinic coordinators receive strong support from their management.  This support takes many forms.  Clinic coordinators are focused primarily on managing their CVITP service, with limited or no additional responsibilities for any other services offered to clients by their organizations.  They often have many years of experience running CVITP clinics, which suggests a low turnover of staff in these positions.  Consequently, they tend to be quite knowledgeable about tax and benefit issues that are relevant to their low-income clients.

They play an active role in recruiting volunteers and tend to be relatively successful at finding new recruits to replenish their pool of CVITP volunteers.  They generally have a larger number of volunteers than the average CVITP host organization.  They may also have developed their own in-house tools for training volunteers.  Their CVITP clinics tend to make use of the Autofill My Return function, although this may sometimes be limited to staff. In some cases, these organizations play a leadership role within their region, helping with the coordinating training opportunities or providing it directly to volunteers in other CVITP host organizations.

Other host organizations

The majority of CVITP host organizations in the six cities visited only provide CVITP services with no broader objective to empower their clients financially.  Some are community-based organizations that already offer a range of other social services to their clients.  Others are focused on providing this service primarily to a specific ethnic or religion-based community.  They tend to have no dedicated in-house funding for running CVITP clinics.  While their staff welcome the CRA’s pilot grant program, they generally caution that it is not generous enough to cover all or even most of the costs they incur in running these clinics.  They tend to offer CVITP services in March and April only and serve relatively smaller numbers of clients during this period.

The responsibility for organizing CVITP clinics usually falls on the shoulders of one staff person who already has other client service or program-related responsibilities.  Thus, they do not have much time to devote to organizing their CVITP clinics.  They also do not tend to be especially knowledgeable about tax and benefit issues relevant to their low-income clients.

Their CVITP clinics often have few volunteers, some of whom have many years of experience.  Clinic coordinators in these organizations tend to be more reliant on volunteer referrals from the CRA than on recruiting their own clinic volunteers.  Their volunteers rely to a greater extent on the CRA’s training tools as in-house training on tax and benefit matters is usually not offered.  And, given their very limited knowledge about tax and benefit issues, clinic coordinators’ supervision of volunteers is frequently limited to tracking volunteers’ service to clients and management of client documentation.  Volunteer use of the Autofill My Return function tends to be promoted less often by these clinic coordinators as they themselves frequently do not understand how the function works nor how useful it can be.

In some instances, these community organizations rely primarily or exclusively on staff to prepare and file client returns as they have very few or no capable volunteer resources.  The use of Autofill My Return is less common but tends to be more so in those host organizations that rely primarily or exclusively on staff to prepare and file client returns.

Does this resonate with your experience in dealing with host organizations in your city?

What important features are missing from these descriptions?

Which of the two do you think your host organization is most alike?

What if this is also true of the bigger picture?

While these observations are limited to the community-based organizations in the six cities we visited, we assume that the many characteristics outlined above are common to similar host organizations in other cities.  If our assumption is correct, then the CRA has a challenge.

This is because community-based organizations without any financial empowerment objective seem to form the overwhelming majority of CVITP host organizations across Canada.  This means the CRA is heavily reliant on organizations with a more limited financial mandate and weaker capacity to reach most residents that need to be served by the CVITP.

If the CRA wants the CVITP to both recover to the level of service seen in 2019 and to expand further in the coming years, the CRA will need to play a much stronger role in providing support to these organizations and their volunteers.

Further reliance by the CRA on an “arm’s length model” will be insufficient to address this challenge.  The only CRA support that has significantly changed in recent years is the introduction of the pilot grant program in 2021, following the disastrous results from the 2020 tax season.

While this pilot program is welcome, it seems to have been successful mostly at encouraging host organizations which closed during the COVID pandemic to reopen and once again offer their CVITP services.  The 2021 and 2022 tax seasons saw a bounce back in the numbers of clients served and returns filed although not to the levels reached in the 2019 tax season.

To date, the CRA has not used any grant money to strengthen the CVITP delivery infrastructure.  This is despite quadrupling its CVITP operations budget between 2016 and 2018.

Instead, more recently it seems the CRA may have reduced its ambitions for the CVITP.

Is this because the CRA is betting that many of the returns of existing CVITP clients will be shifted to “automatic filing” in the coming years?  If so, we think this is mistaken as automatic filing is unlikely to reduce the demands placed on the CVITP.

If the CRA is to move the CVITP well beyond the levels reach in the 2019 tax season, it will have to do more than rely on “payment for results” (i.e. its pilot grant program).

A more constructive approach

In addition to making its pilot grant program a regular feature of the CRA’s support to the CVITP, we believe the CRA should also be investing money upfront to significantly improve the CVITP services of host organizations that do not have a financial empowerment objective.

One way could be to provide additional financial resources to those CVITP host organizations with a financial empowerment objective and the willingness to use their staff and expertise to support CVITP capacity building in their region.   These designated CVITP host organizations would use these CRA resources to help other CVITP host organizations in their area with efforts to recruit, train, supervise and use increasingly scarce volunteer resources, and to collect, analyze and aggregate client data to demonstrate the program’s impact.

The CRA would pay for but not need to get involved directly in these efforts.  With such a mechanism in place, the CRA’s current efforts in supporting the CVITP’s delivery infrastructure could be significantly enhanced.  (We have previously called for the CRA to provide this kind of indirect support.)

For example, when individuals register with the CRA as a new CVITP volunteer, the CRA could refer these individuals to these designated CVITP host organizations for subsequent CVITP orientation and placement with other local host organizations.

Any agreement between the CRA and designated CVITP host organizations willing to do this coordination work would need to identify areas for capacity building support specifically tailored to local conditions.  These designated CVITP host organizations would be expected to collaborate while respecting the autonomy of other host organizations.  (These other host organizations would be free to accept or reject what would amount to offers of free support.)

That said, the CRA would not deny any CVITP host organization direct support if requested.  But the CRA’s CVITP staff would have the option of first referring these requests to the locally designated CVITP host organization.  This would allow the CRA’s CVITP staff to focus their time and efforts on providing support to the designated CVITP host organization in their region and its work on their behalf.

We realize this is opening new territory for the CRA.  It is one thing to pay for results achieved, as it does within the current pilot project and quite another to pay for capacity building efforts without any guarantee that these efforts will be successful.  We do not believe that the CRA has any prior experience in financing efforts to build capacity within community-based organizations.

However, as we have noted elsewhere, the Department of Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) has substantial experience doing this kind of thing.  For example, its Social Development Partnerships Program has collaborated with Prosper Canada in the past to build the capacity of financial empowerment champions within communities across Canada.

Through discussions with ESDC, the CRA could learn much about how to build CVITP capacity using lead community-based organizations.  Informed by this knowledge, the CRA could enter into agreements with designated host organizations with financial empowerment objectives and the willingness to use their staff and expertise to support building CVITP capacity in their region.  These agreements would include objectives with outcomes and performance indicators against which these organizations would need to report; in turn, the CRA would provide money for these organizations’ work to meet these objectives.

What do you think of this approach?

How might an approach to building the capacity of host organizations based in rural areas differ from what is proposed here?