Tax Update / NPOs under scrutiny

Gov't needs money, and they are looking to tighten up where they perceive there is potential.

Did you know there's a Not for Profit risk project under way?
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/nnprft/nprp-eng.html

Apparently NPO's have been receiving CRA audit letters advising them that they are off-side, but that they won't be penalized this time.

A few years ago now, I organized a one of a kind panel discussion on NPO compliance for my CGA chapter. I doubt I could ever get those experts together all in one place again. They each put in a supreme effort and participated in an impressive, and professional manner.

At that time, I called CRA, to ask who was responsible for NPO's. I was looking for a speaker. After all, if an NPO earns income, they do have to file a T2 and pay tax on that portion of their income. I wanted my audience to hear about it from those who enforce that rule.

When I called, I was direct to Charities. After all Charities are a form of NPO, so that made sense.  But Charities said no, that would be Business. So I called Business. Business said, you guessed it... no that would be Charities.

At that point, I called Ottawa. Ottawa called me back. Well someone there, that I'd met years ago at Deloittes in Vancouver who works in Ottawa for CRA now called. He was very interested in one statistic I had found, that about 12% of the GDP was from NPO's. That's a lot of GDP. As for who was responsible for all that NPO business? No one.  Well it seems that someone took an interest in my question. Nice to see that CRA listens when you ask questions. BTW, there were many CRA employees who stepped up, in fact we had to select only a few, because so many had something to say. See the panel report on my NPO links page for what they had to say.

If you want to learn more about NPO's and their requirements for compliance and governance, I put together a page of useful links and at the top of that page, there is a summary PowerPoint PDF of the panel discussion key points. There aren't very many resources about NPO compliance, so the University of the Fraser Valley NPO Mgmt program linked to this particular resource, and it gets the most hits of all the pages on my website. If you're an NPO manager and haven't got certification, this program at UFV is run in conjunction with the Province of BC.

http://www.taxdetective.ca/Nonprofitlinks.html