Perrin Beatty comments on Canada Revenue Agency Tax Bullies :CCRA SOTW
Alan Baggett
COLUMN: Time for tax fairness
By Don Cayo, Vancouver Sun
Published: Thursday, January 24, 2008
Tax-collecting bullies, beware. Your actions may well cost the system
more than you take in through inflated assessments and aggressive
collection, says the only former national revenue minister I can
recall who built his reputation on fairness and giving the honest
taxpayer a break.
Canada's fragile, but precious, tradition of voluntary tax compliance
will simply wither if citizens come to believe the system is unfair,
says Perrin Beatty, who was once a super-star critic of what used to
be Revenue Canada, then its reforming minister, and now the head of
the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
I'd be taking notes if I were Gordon O'Connor, a fairly new guy to the
portfolio who has yet to make any mark, positive or negative, in the
job.
Beatty doesn't claim intimate insight into what's going on in the
department these days. Specifically, he doesn't know how well his
fairness reforms of the mid-1980s are standing up in today's practice.
But he does know about the temptation to backslide on any fairness
commitment - about the pressure from a gluttonous government for the
taxman "to upend the taxpayer and shake until the coins fall out of
his pocket."
And he does know what it takes to ride herd on that temptation and
keep the bullying under control.
Beatty was barely in his 30s, though a 10-year veteran of Parliament,
when he headed a headline-grabbing Tory committee that traveled the
country unearthing tax horror stories reminiscent of the ones I've
been telling in this column of late.
When the Mulroney government swept to power in 1984, in significant
measure on the strength of its call for fairer taxation, Beatty was
appointed national revenue minister. And he immediately enacted some
significant reforms - an end to the quota system on which staff
performance was judged, the ability for taxpayers to get advance
rulings on unclear rules, and the entrenchment of basic taxpayer
rights to fairness and respect.
These things still exist on paper - indeed, the current government has
buffed them up. But the stories of taxpayer abuse I'm hearing suggest
they're being seriously flouted in practice.
That suggests the problem is at least as much a perverse culture
within the CRA as it is a flaw in law.
And in Beatty's experience, the toughest job is to fix an us-against-
them attitude - a sour view that all taxpayers are cheats and deserve
the worst the bureaucracy can throw at them.
When he took office as an energetic young minister, Beatty says, he
inherited a department with a long tradition "of strong deputies and
weak ministers . . . who were passing through on their way up or on
their way out."
He recalls a briefing book he found in his new ministerial office that
had been prepared for a predecessor. It said to expect perhaps a
question a week when the House is in session. And "if it was about
policy, to defer to the minister of finance; and if it was about
administration, don't answer because of privacy concerns."
I don't see much evidence that, except for Beatty's activist years,
the job has ever become more complex than just that. But it should.
I am simply not reassured - and neither are large numbers of my
readers - by the bland assurances O'Connor gave me in his much-belated
response two weeks ago to the horror stories I've been telling.
Collectively, these tales sound far too much like systemic
dysfunction.
I may be wrong. Indeed, I hope I'm wrong - I'd like nothing better
than to believe that the folks I've been directing to call O'Connor's
office for the last couple of weeks will find all their problems
efficiently and fairly solved.
But, although I'll be setting aside this beat for the next few weeks
while I'm doing some traveling and working on other stories, I won't
hold my breath.
It has reached the point - on the evidence published in this newspaper
alone, not to mention the tax tales told by other writers in other
media - that a Beatty-like examination of the facts is clearly called
for. It is time for some group - perhaps a parliamentary committee -
to step up to the plate and take a thorough look at the current level
of fairness in the tax collection system.
Then it can do one of two things: Put minds to rest for me and the
hundreds of readers who tell me they share my concern about a tax
department careening out of control. Or start formulating meaningful
reforms of both the laws that are mandating unfair outcomes and the
bureaucratic practices that are making a bad situation worse.
dc...@png.canwest.com
© Vancouver Sun
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Miss a Tax Tale Miss a lot!
Click the link for the new, updated and revised CCRA SOTW index!
http://groups.google.com/group/can.taxes/browse_thread/thread/0650fd3969d59a17#
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------