CRA’s brand has been hurt in the past 18 months as a result of the now-cancelled plan to increase the taxable portion of a capital gain over $250,000 to 66.67 per cent from 50 per cent.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
A mission statement for the Canada Revenue Agency is to quietly collect taxes and stay out of the news.
So much for that. Tax collection continues apace, but CRA’s troublesome website for taxpayers has been in the news consistently this year. Rather than helping people complete their taxes and monitor their finances, this website is getting in the way.
Where there is technology, there is periodic failure. Bank computer systems and whole wireless networks have gone down briefly. What’s happening at CRA is different in its persistence and the lack of accountability. The new federal government has plenty on its priority list for building the economy, but CRA’s My Account website needs a fix right now.
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Conceptually, My Account is just fine. While it won’t win any awards for user experience, it works well as a hub for monitoring your tax returns and tax owing or refunds. You can also track tax credits you may be eligible for, contribution room for registered retirement savings plans and tax-free savings accounts and repayments required if you used the federal Home Buyers’ Plan.
Ideally, My Account also offers copies of your T3, T4 and T5 slips. You should have access to these essential tax slips electronically from the issuing employer or financial company, or you may receive paper copies by mail. But accessing these slips on My Account wins for efficiency because everything you need is at hand when the system is working.
Globe and Mail personal economics reporter Erica Alini has catalogued the problems with My Account in the lead-up to the April 30 deadline for filing personal income-tax returns, and more recently. There have been both missing and duplicate tax slips, and some people trying to file their returns electronically received incorrect error codes.
The latest glitch has prevented My Account from showing the most recent information about TFSA contribution room. CRA says it blocked TFSA information updates because of delays in processing TFSA data submitted by financial institutions.
When I checked my own TFSA information on My Account recently, there was a notice saying “This service is not available at this time. Please try again later.” That’s a message appropriate to a website problem expected to last minutes or maybe hours – not weeks and maybe months.
This information blackout is a serious problem for people seeking a CRA determination of how much accumulated TFSA contribution room they have. Stiff penalties apply if you overcontribute to a TFSA, yet CRA typically does not update contributions made in a calendar year until April or May of the next year.
Now, CRA is further behind than usual in helping people find out how much they can add to a TFSA in 2025 without incurring penalties. A reader said last week that he’s missing out on an online bank’s promotion offering a high interest rate because he doesn’t know exactly how much TFSA room he has.
CRA’s brand has been hurt in the past 18 months as a result of the botched introduction of filing rules for bare trusts, and the now-cancelled plan to increase the taxable portion of a capital gain over $250,000 to 66.67 per cent from 50 per cent. To be fair to CRA, it had the job of administering policy created by the Department of Finance, with changes seemingly being made on the fly.
The new federal cabinet does not include a revenue minister, previously a junior position. Finance Minster François-Philippe Champagne will oversee CRA, which seems like a reasonable way to ease cabinet bloat. But it also supports the feeling that there is no sense of government ownership of CRA.
What’s needed right now is an inventory of the problems facing users of My Account, a timeline for fixes and an acknowledgement of the inconvenience faced by taxpayers. Government’s apparent obliviousness has to end.
There is an unspoken arrangement between CRA and taxpayers that keeps the tax system running. Taxpayers are supposed to pay what they owe, and CRA is expected to make the process as easy as possible and not complicate things. My Account does this at its best, but not right now.
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