Time’s Up: CRA’s 100 Day Mandate for Improvement

After years of frustration on the part of tax professionals and taxpayers alike, the Finance Minister ordered the Canada Revenue Agency to clean up its act in 100 days. Specifically, the improvement plan was to run from September 2 through December 11. Finance Minister and Minister of National Revenue, Francoise-Phillippe Champagne instructed CRA to fix “unacceptable wait times and service delays.” Time’s up this week and CRA has released an update on progress. What gets measured, gets done. Let’s see what CRA’s metrics show. 

CRA’s push to get Canadians to file their tax returns electronically has been extremely successful this year, driving a million more tax filers to use EFILING services with a professional and a million more to use NETFILING. 

On May 1, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) announced that two corporations and the director of one plead guilty to tax evasion charges in the Provincial Court of Manitoba. The fines totaled a hefty $731,986.

Comedian Ray Romano once said, "Having children is a lot like living in a frat house – nobody sleeps, everything’s broken, and there’s a lot of throwing up.”  But aside from being highly amusing calamities at times, families are also powerful economic unions which are subject to fairly complicated tax rules.

Recently, the federal and several provincial governments have announced their intention of introducing Social Impact Bonds.

On May 9, the Honourable Gail Shea, Minister of National Revenue, released a statement that the US, Australia, and the UK announced they are in possession of tax-related information involving numerous trusts and companies holding assets on behalf of residents in jurisdictions around the world.

In the May 8 issue of KBR, the article “Understanding Synthetic Dispositions” explained the concepts of synthetic dispositions and their tax implications. In this issue, we provide an example involving the forward sale of securities.