CRA Sitting on $25.4M of Unclaimed Tax Refunds - CRA SOTW
Alan Baggett
Canada sitting on $25.4M pile of unclaimed tax refunds
Tim Shufelt, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Monday, June 09, 2008
Despite its best efforts to throw around millions in tax money, the
federal government just can't seem to give it away.
Tax specialists at the Canada Revenue Agency are trying to distribute
millions of dollars rightly belonging to Canadian taxpayers, with
mixed success.
Over the past 12 years, more than $25.4 million in undeliverable tax
returns has piled up in a government bank account. Almost 40,000
cheques, averaging $657 each, have yet to find their way back to their
rightful owners.
Most commonly, tax money cannot be delivered when a person files their
return, moves and forgets to provide the government with a new
address.
"If you're moving, when you already have so many things you're
thinking about, you have to remember to update your information with
the CRA," said agency spokeswoman Catherine Jolicoeur.
Others fail to plan for their estates properly before they die. Still
others simply forget to cash their cheques, Ms. Jolicoeur said. "If
you finally find it in your drawer, and say, 'Oops, I didn't cash
this,' you can cash it two years later, you can cash it five years
later, it's not staledated."
Similarly, it's never too late for Canadians estranged from their tax
refunds to arrange a reunion with their long-lost money, Ms. Jolicoeur
said.
As long as they can identify themselves, individuals owed refunds can
request a reissued cheque from the agency. Otherwise, the money may
remain forever in a government-run orphanage for abandoned money -- a
consolidated revenue account.
But the agency is not waiting for people to come forward to claim
their money, she said. Once a cheque is returned to sender, one of the
dozens of tax centres located across the country is tasked with
keeping track of an individual's address changes.
However, privacy laws prevent the government from sharing change of
address information across departments, Ms. Jolicoeur said.
Over time, however, the agency is able to whittle down the number of
undeliverable cheques for each given year. For 2007, which still
remains an open tax year, 11,112 refunds totalling $8.2 million remain
to be sent out.
For the 1996 tax year, however, 1,001 cheques remain unclaimed,
totalling $529,156.
The agency's efforts are less and less successful the longer the money
sits in a bank account. In more than nine years of trying to
distribute about 2,800 undeliverable tax cheques worth almost $1.2
million from 1997, for example, half of that money is still unclaimed.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008
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