Organization of Technical Information on the CRA website

There's something of note afoot on the CRA website and I haven't seen any official notifications, but then every so often I do take a break so maybe I missed it.

Last fall CRA announced they are going to undertake a review and overhaul of IT Bulletins and IT News. We're getting a whole new collection of technical publications called Income Tax Folios

Here's the introduction and discussion about phasing out IT Bulletins

http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/tchncl/ncmtx/ntrfls-eng.html

In preparation for that, they have provided a great listing which IT Bulletins apply to that section of the Income Tax Act by section:

It's called IT-INDEX and here's the link:

http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pub/tp/it-index/it-index-e.html

What's disappointing about the new IT Folio Index at first glance, is that they follow the Indexing system currently in place on the website, one which divides up taxpayers into groups, rather than dealing with topical pursuits, like meals, vehicles, home offices, personal service businesses as a topic, with discussion about the differences between the rules for the various taxpayer groups.

Maybe somewhere in this new work, they'll find a way to cross reference by topic, something which the current website is terrible at.  I don't know how many times I've been researching something under one taxpayer group and found myself under the rules for a completely different group, which has different rules for that topic than the ones for the taxpayer I was hoping to learn about.

Here's the taxpayer groups I'm referring to:

http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/tchncl/ncmtx/fls/menu-eng.html

I give the team that writes the technical interpretations kudos for some amazing work over the years, and I know how difficult it's been with the myriad of changes in legislation, keeping up must be a huge challenge.