The current situation

As volunteers have varying levels of experience and sometimes minimal training, one should expect that mistakes will be made when preparing returns.  If a client return contains an error when it is efiled, this may be picked up by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and corrected in the client’s notice of assessment.  Then again, the CRA may realize the mistake only later and issue a reassessment.  In the latter instance, if the client owes money to the CRA, this will be indicated in the reassessment.

One thing is clear: the CVITP volunteer who prepared and filed the client’s return will never be notified of the error they made.  In fact, the volunteer will receive no feedback from the CRA, not even on the total number of returns they filed containing errors, to say nothing of the nature of these errors and what should have been done instead.

What’s wrong with this picture?

As indicated above, the CRA provides no feedback to the volunteer on the errors they have made.  Its focus is on communicating the error to the client, on the assumption that the client fully understands the reasons for the entries made in their return filed by the volunteer.  At the very least, the CRA has a responsibility to communicate the nature of the error to the client.  Perhaps the CRA also hopes the client will understand this and avoid making the same mistake again in the future.  However, it is not always reasonable to assume that the client fully understands the reasons for all of the entries the volunteer made on their return.

The absence of feedback to the volunteer means that the volunteer is liable to repeat the same mistakes again in other clients’ returns.  In the immediate, this generates more work for the CRA in finding and correcting these mistakes.  In the longer term, it can hamper the credibility of the CVITP clinics, as clients get stung with the consequences of mistakes made by CVITP volunteers.

What’s a solution?

As many clients’ errors may actually originate in mistakes made by CVITP volunteers, the CRA also has a responsibility to protect the integrity and reputation of the CVITP which encompasses the volunteers and their host organizations.

Volunteers and their host organizations do this work because they take return preparation and filing seriously; they care about the well-being of poor people in their communities.  If they learned that they were making mistakes, they might very well feel dismayed to have let down their clients by providing them with less than the best possible service.

As a measure of respect for its volunteers and their host organizations and the value it holds for the CVITP services they provide, the CRA should see volunteer errors as an opportunity for everyone to learn and improve the quality of CVITP service.

To start with, the CRA could ensure there is internal communication between the division of the CRA that identifies errors in client returns and the division of the CRA that manages the CVITP.  Armed with data on the number and types of errors, the CRA office responsible for the CVITP could track and prevent future volunteer filing errors by communicating directly with volunteers.  What might this look like?

The CRA could provide statistics on the percentage of returns which have been filed error-free.   It could also identify and publicize the specific errors.  At the same time, it could provide advice on how to avoid making these errors in the future.  This would be a great start toward providing feedback at the national, regional and local levels and could go some way to improving CVITP service delivery.

But that is just the start.  If the CRA could do all of the foregoing with aggregated information on errors, it could also be providing information targeted to specific volunteers.  After all, using the unique Efile number each volunteer has, the CRA can attribute specific filing errors it finds in returns to the volunteers who filed those returns.  Therefore, it could provide the same feedback as above but tailored to individual volunteers: the number of error-free returns filed by the volunteer, the nature of the errors the volunteer has made, and advice on how the volunteer can correct for these errors in the future.

(Using the new CVITP Organization Identification Number or COIN to be introduced this year, the CRA could do something similar for host organizations, identifying and sharing common return filing errors together with the correct measures by province or territory, region or municipality.)

This kind of volunteer-specific feedback could make a significant dent in filing errors while boosting volunteers’ confidence that they are providing accurate advice to clients.