The topic of Monday's meeting with CRA (November 26th, 2012) at the Vancouver Marriott Pinnacle will be:
How can CRA address these priority themes to make it easier for SMB to fulfill their tax obligations?
- Information availability and clarity
- Reporting obligations - current process and possible changes and enhancements
- Usage of existing online services
- Exploration of potential online services
- Duplication of information requirements across federal departments and across different levels of government
1) Information availability and clarity could be improved significantly if information on major topical themes wasn't scattered all over the CRA website in an attempt to accommodate specific readers, much to the confusion of anyone searching for information. There are times when searching for information that one ends up in the wrong section but it's the right heading, but for the wrong taxpayer, and this leads to all kinds of additional confusion.
The only saving grace is that when you find yourself reading about a topic, you can glance up at the top of the page to find the string of locations that have led you to this particular page. I will find myself in Corporate or Payroll when I was looking for something under Self-Employed because of the overlap in rules and the mis-directions that can occur while utilizing the search engine in the software. There's no linkage to all the possible variations of which taxpayers might also have specific rules that would be similar, or different.
The current website layout by taxpayer type isn't working very well at all. Unless there is an attempt made to also have topical themes and cross link to those themes, people will end up at the wrong information.
The current search engine doesn't find commonly used tax words such as personal services business, or it finds totally irrelevant information in the hidden backgrounder financial and statistical analysis instead of finding useful information for a taxpayer on a topic.
For example, the deductability of meals is found under employees, salaried, commission, transportation employees, northern residents, travel, railway employees, moving, medical, conventions, truckers, self-employed, corporate, charities. I'm sure there's more. There's references to meals in various technical documents, but there's no compilation of where all the sources are in one place, and no reconciliation of when the rules apply, to whom they apply and why they don't apply in all cases. It's no wonder people get confused by the meals rules. And add to that, there's times when it's 100%, and times when it's $50 (conventions). I didn't add that there's meals that can be taxable employee benefits...and a policy shift in taxable benefits found in a newsletter in 2009...
http://www.taxdetective.ca/newsletters/newsletter/1482040/65541.htm
I've attempted to compile all of that information to determine when the rules apply, to whom they apply, and why there is a difference between the various stakeholders and how their meals are treated for tax purposes.
Here is an example. This article was a question about taking a trip over to Nanaimo from Vancouver to visit a business location owned by someone with multiple locations, who called me when she bought a coffee at the airport on the way home to ask if she should keep the receipt.
http://www.taxdetective.ca/articles/article/1482041/89556.htm
There are other themes that have similar issues with conflicting information, to name a few key ones; artists and writers, employers and employees versus self-employed, payroll, joint ventures and partnerships, vehicles, capital cost allowance (this one is bizarre as the rules are scattered all over the place), current vs capital, inventory vs capital, repairs vs capital, shareholder loans, shareholder benefits, work in progress elections, client gifts, barter. Then there's the whole topic of GST/HST and the impending switch back to PST. Another area that always concerns me is keeping records. Why is that CRA segregates out electronic records as a separate topic from keeping records when they should be combined? There are keeping records rules all over the place.
Another hot button for me is personal services business. It isn't searchable as a string of words, yet everyone is talking about all of the audits in this area, especially for professionals hired by gov't who are required to incorporate and then attacked because they didn't know these rules didn't allow their income to be active business income and now, they also aren't eligible to claim the CCPC general rate reduction.
You'd have to know to search for the definition of ABI (Active Business Income) under Corporations and even then it's really not identified as such. Same goes for Specified Investment Business. People ought to know how to find the rules, using words that are commonly used in tax update classrooms around the country. There isn't clarity about when you have a corporation and are it's sole shareholder, that you very likely aren't self-employed by your corporation and that you could be subject to these punitive rules.
One more, not small business, but not small either. Death and Taxes. Why is it that it isn't until the end of the process, in fine print on the TX19, that the requirement to produce financial statements accounting for the entire estate from date of death until final disbursements to obtain a clearance certificate is found?
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