The CRA is not faultless, but taxpayers make mistakes, too

Each year, Paul Dubé, Canada's Taxpayers' Ombudsman, tells us, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) processes some 34-million payments from Canadian taxpayers. As well, Canadian taxpayers often have multiple accounts: personal income tax accounts, corporate accounts and GST/HST accounts. Errors happen ó and taxpayers spend hours and dollars trying to make things right with the CRA.

They also complain to the Office of the Taxpayers' Ombudsman, which has resulted in the recent release of Dubé's special report, entitled Getting it Right: Investigation of service and fairness issues arising from the misallocation of payments by the Canada Revenue Agency. Although Dubé did find the CRA was often at fault, generally due to keying errors, he also found taxpayers had their own issues, particularly when it came to sending cheques as payments to the CRA.

So, what can you do to smooth the process? The types of errors the report found include:

• unclear or illegible handwriting;
• payments with incorrect information or without the proper remittance vouchers provided by the CRA;
• omission of identifying information such as a business number or social insurance number;
• issues with date transference. For example, does 11-06-2009 mean June 11, 2009, or November 6, 2009?

Remittance vouchers are a particular problem, says the report. "Remittance vouchers are pre-printed with magnetic ink,î the report tells us, "which allows the information they contain to be read by a computer through the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanning technology.î The idea is that these vouchers will facilitate efficient processing and allocation of payments.

But problems occur when taxpayers reproduce or photocopy the vouchers. "The OCR scanning technology will not recognize the ordinary inks used by photocopiers and standard printers.î Despite various warnings, the CRA still receives payments accompanied by photocopied vouchers that cannot be scanned electronically.

But Dubé still holds the CRA accountable. In Getting it Right, Dubé makes three recommendations:

ï The CRA reviews its standards and procedures for processing payments to ensure that CRA employees are afforded sufficient time to perform their duties accurately and thoroughly.

ï The CRA determines the optimal remittance batch limit for the most efficient detection of processing errors.

ï The CRA educates taxpayers on how to avoid making remittance errors as well as how

to have them corrected when they do occur.