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. 

The first section of this calculator will give you a quick answer to how much tax saving are available by making an RRSP contribution. Use the second section to determine the costs of a proposed RRSP loan and compare the loan costs to the earnings within the RRSP during the loan repayment period.

The income gap between Canada’s top 1% of taxfilers and the other 99% is still substantial. But, so too is the gap between the amount of taxes paid by the two groups. In 2010, the “rich” accounted for a disproportionate share.

On Jan. 14, Gary William Mechar of Kamloops, B.C., was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay $276,655 in restitution to two financial institutions.

The unstable global economy tops the list of “urgent” issues to address in 2013, says the World Economic Forum (WEF).

It’s no secret that governments are awash in debt. But, where is the money to pay down federal and provincial deficits and accumulated debt going to come from?

A recently released judgment from the Tax Court of Canada testifies to the importance of good record-keeping and exemplifies a clever method that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) invokes when investigating taxpayers who hide behind inadequate records.