Thank you. I can provide clarification of that, Mr. Chair.
No. Back in 1961—this has been going on for a long time—the CRA said that Hutterite colonies would report their income as farming income. Even though the income is determined at the colony level, it ends up being allocated out to the individuals and taxed on their personal tax returns as farming income. This has been required since 1961.
When the working income tax benefit came in, they reported it on their tax returns, from 2007 up until 2014, and the CRA assessed their returns as filed. However, what actually happened was that another accounting firm had been reporting their colonies' returns—they do only two colonies. They reported that income as other income instead of how the CRA had specified it, as being reported as farming income, so this triggered an inquiry by this accountant to ask why.
This led to the CRA providing an interpretation saying, no, just for purposes of the working income tax benefit, we are not going to consider it to be farming income. For every other purpose, whether it is for paying instalments, or back when NISA was involved, or the five-year block averaging, all historically and for everything else, it's considered farming income. Just for the working income tax benefit, we're going to say, no, it's not farming income. They had been filing it. There has been no change in the act. It's simply an interpretation by the CRA.