More Canadians than ever are filing their taxes but declining to pay them, pushing the uncollected amount to a record level.
OTTAWA – Is the Canada Revenue Agency doing a bad job collecting taxes? The answer would seem yes if you look at the owed taxes which has ballooned to $44 billion.
The amount of tax that Canadians admit to owing Ottawa but haven’t paid rose to a record $43.8 billion this year, despite a Liberal government promise to “stabilize” that sum.
And an internal Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) projection obtained by CBC News says the amount of unpaid tax owed is set to hit more than $47 billion by 2020, reported CBC News.
The steady increase in the tax debt — up by about $2 billion annually since the Liberals came to power — comes despite a major investment in the 2016 federal budget to wrestle down fast-rising levels of uncollected tax debt.
The rise in the tax debt level over the last decade or so appears to be linked to major staff reductions at CRA under the former Conservative government’s deficit-cutting program.
The 2016 Liberal budget gave the CRA $351.6 million over five years “to improve its ability to collect outstanding tax debts.”
And the agency says it’s on track to meet its target of collecting $7.4 billion in additional tax debt over those five years.
But that effort hasn’t stopped the total from growing — by 5.6 per cent in 2017-2018 alone, far faster than inflation or the economy itself.
The agency currently does not collect about $8.40 for every $100 in taxes that are due.
