Others are covering the details of the article, I took a look at the source. It only started up last year:
Canadian Affairs was founded by Lauren Heuser in 2023. You can read why Lauren founded a publication for families and professionals in her founding essay.
Canadian Affairs is independent and nonpartisan. It is wholly owned by Lauren and has no outside investors. It is a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization.
This article is such an apples to oranges comparison.
In Canada (except for Quebec), the CRA collects provincial tax returns and tax money owing/reimbursing from all Canadians, then gives the collected amounts to the provinces so that the forms are all of standard format and there’s no need for 13 separate fully fledged tax collection programs.
Each state has its own way of doing things so you get 50 tax departments, woohoo. Sure both the US and Canada have municipal tax departments for property and specific location taxes, but that’s usually much narrower in scope and often processed in the same department that manages public infrastructure fees.
Paywalled article (It’s also nearly a year old). I am very suspicious of the parts I was able to read:
Comparing to the IRS seems almost useless. Anyone who has ever had to deal with the IRS can tell you it’s severely, severely under-funded.
Quoting the Canadian Taxpayers Federation like they’re a neutral voice doesn’t give me a lot of faith in the rest of this article. They’re an astrorurfing, libertarian organization.
I don’t know anything about Australia’s tax system or how well it’s run, but it’s curious that they have roughly half the staff Canada did before this hiring spree with almost 3/4 the population.
I would be interested to read a comparison of the CRA to other taxation authorities throughout the world, to see what we could learn, but I didn’t find anything of that nature before the paywall.
Well said. I will just add that the major distinction as someone else pointed out is that the CRA handles all the taxes for provinces, not just federal, and also administers benefits, which make up a large portion of its funding and staff.
I was curious and looked up their report card for last year CRA 2022-23 departmental results, and I’m not sure where this article got some of its information, but it’s quite a bit off, and doesn’t mention published info (at least not in the non-paywalled section).
There is a good table that shows money spent and employees, as well as explanations for the major increase for last fiscal and the major upcoming decreases. TL;DR: major new benefits and changes require employees.
The increase in actual FTEs in 2022–23 is largely attributable to the administration of measures announced in the 2021 and 2022 federal budgets and economic statements as well as those associated with addressing the post-pandemic sustainability of CRA contact centres and the administration of the one-time top-up to the Canada Housing Benefit and the interim Canada Dental Benefit. Over the planning period, the reduction in FTEs from 50,195 in 2023–24 to 47,631 in 2024–25, is primarily as a result of a decrease or sunsetting of funding to implement and administer various measures announced in the federal budgets and economic statements as well as those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.
To your last point on comparing the CRA to other taxation authorities, some months ago I went down a rabbit hole and I found something like this on the OECD website, but can’t seem to find it now, so I will just link the main page. It wasn’t a comparison between tax administrations per se, but it was a short summary of each country’s stats, how much money they bring in, spend, where they fit globally, employee counts, etc. You could then compare to others yourself. Very informative, and according to those stats, CRA was near the top IIRC.
Yeah it’s definitely an apples to oranges comparison, especially since the CRA does tax (federal and provincial/territorial) as well as benefits, while all the others are just federal tax. And agreed the IRS is way underfunded and understaffed.
I went on a bit of a deep dive and looked at the CRAs report cards and departmental plans. Lots of neat information there for 2022-23 fiscal year (not sure why that was in a plan for next year, but interesting stats nonetheless)
$379B in tax revenue (85% of government annual revenue)
$639B in revenue and pensions administered
$46.4B in benefits to Canadians
$89.1B of tax debt resolved
$13.1B actual spending
There was also a tidbit about tax cheats specifically, and $14.3B coming from that alone, which is $1.2B more brought in, than they spent. Not bad.
As a result, the CRA has increased its ability to identify and target aggressive tax planning, and increased the volume of its gross audit reassessments. A total of 62,660 audits, excluding all other compliance interventions were completed in 2022–23 which had a fiscal impact of $14.3 billion.
The IRS is not something we should be comparing ourselves to. They’re incredibly understaffed.
It’s like a tech company saying it has too many employees because they compare themselves to the employee count at Twitter. Sure, the numbers are small there, but…
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