Canada Revenue Agency Reduces the Compliance Burden for Small Businesses
Ottawa, Ontario, May 31, 2012… The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has released its fourth and final report on the recommendations of its Action Task Force on Small Business Issues.
A key CRA priority is to make it easier for businesses to comply with Canada’s taxation system, while at the same time maintaining the system’s integrity and fairness. Over the past five years, the CRA has addressed all 61 recommendations made by the Agency’s Action Task Force on Small Business Issues, making significant progress in reducing the paper burden for small businesses.
Established in the summer of 2006, the CRA’s Action Task Force was a joint public/private sector task force composed of small business owners, representatives from a number of key business organizations, and senior CRA and Industry Canada officials. Its mandate was to identify CRA’s administrative practices that imposed the greatest burden on small businesses and to develop solutions that would systemically reduce this burden.
The task force’s recommendations focused on three main goals:
- To simplify, improve, and, where appropriate, reduce the frequency of small business interactions with the CRA;
- Improve how and when the CRA communicates with small businesses; and
- Make burden reduction systemic within the CRA.
In responding to each of the task force’s recommendations, the CRA undertook a broad range of measures, including improving electronic services, increasing filing and remitting thresholds, and establishing a framework to measure progress in burden reduction. Other specific actions included:
- continued refinement and expansion of the on-line service called My Business Account to provide business owners with faster, more accessible, and more transparent government service;
- continued outreach and consultation with small businesses;
- using innovative ways and formats to convey information including business-related Webinars and videocasts; and
- working closely with the Department of Finance and provincial and territorial counterparts to identify ways to reduce the burden on small business.
The Final Report on Action Items summarizes the actions taken by the CRA to respond to all 61 recommendations, and is available on the CRA website at www.cra.gc.ca/atfreport.
Source: Canada Revenue Agency Newsroom 2012
