The 'BLOAT' At The CRA :-( | Page 2 | Your stories | Discussion forum

Dean said

Interesting ⬆ ... but the two are not really comparable.
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That's right. "Mainland" Singapore is around 50 km east to west and 30 km north to south.

If there was a trans-Singapore highway, one could drive it in less than an hour at 50 km/h. In contrast, the Trans-Canada Highway would take days to drive even at 100 km/h.

Singapore has its own issues. It's run as a benevolent dictatorship.

Canada’s taxation problem is that qualified young people who are not particularly well off and want to work hard get taxed to death and see few incentives while CRA staff are by and large incompetent, lazy and growing in numbers superfast. We don’t need Singapore to see that it's a wrong.

usephrase said
If you find a job at the government, your life will be so easy, your pay will be very good, plus pensions benefits...
Should fire more than 50% of them.
Most of government divisions or organizations should be shut down, let all of them go.  

I went to my local public library (I think run by the municipality) yesterday and the big sign on the door said closed Friday (Good Friday), closed Saturday and Sunday (normally open) closed Monday (Easter Monday).

I say no more.

CRA dropped the ball this year what with all their revisions they threw at financial institutions late in the game. It has been havoc with FIs getting their electronic data accepted by CRA.

However, we all should have all of our tax slips now directly from financial institutions, either online in PDF form or mailed via Canada Post. We have what we need to input into tax software for filing purposes regardless of what has gone off the rails between slip issuers and CRA.

SaverJunior said

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Many banks said they already submitted the slips to the CRA long time ago. I think the slips gotta be sitting somewhere in the CRA data centre. I am calling the CRA to extend the filing deadline until they got them posted to the public.

A Globe & Mail article a few weeks ago explained the situation. The uploads were rejected.

CRA had sent out e-mail confirmations that the uploads were received. Issuers thought that was it for 2024. CRA later found issues with the uploads and rejected them.

For some reason, issuers didn't receive any notification of the rejections!

What I've read so far are about issues around the information slip uploads. For example, the uploads of T3, T4, and T5 slips from employers and financial institutions.

Haven't read anything yet about NETFILE or EFILE being broken.

Maybe Canada-Australia is a better comparable than Canada-Singapore. I used Canada-Singapore basically because I like my Singaporean friend.

Anybody familiar with Australia?

It's difficult to say whether Canada is good or bad when we don't compare it to other countries. It's like having the Olympics and you are the only country competing.

Well, in 1993-2004 UK they had HMRC rather than CRA and there was zero “bloat”.

An employee with a savings/pension accounts didn’t need to submit a tax return, it was all automated. Banks and employers reported income and HMRC dealt with it. You could challenge of course if they got something wrong but they never did.

Only self-employed or people who realized capital gains would have to submit returns. Tax bands were easy to remember; a single set which went from zero to 40%. There was none of the pre-election BS in the form of newspaper/sports activity/transportation credits, pension sharing, etc.

Gargantuan Canadian taxation system came as a bit of a shock and it got worse since.