Thank you to the Auditor General and to his departmental officials for being here today and speaking to our committee.
I want to talk about the income tax objections and your report on the Canada Revenue Agency. I want to highlight some of the things that I found and then ask a question about what you looked into in the process of objections.
I know how challenging it is for people. There are constituents who have come to my office saying that they have had to wait for months, but in your report, you highlight that some Canadians are waiting not just months but years or over a decade for a particular objection to be resolved. It's quite disheartening to hear of that lack of service being provided to our taxpayers, particularly when we have a Taxpayer Bill of Rights that specifically gives Canadians 16 rights that are centred around accuracy, professionalism, courtesy, and fairness.
When a taxpayer files an objection and then perhaps is not successful, they potentially end up having to pay interest, sometimes hundreds of dollars. Over the past decade we've seen that these objections have more than doubled and almost tripled.
In your report, you say that objections were not being processed in a timely way. You specifically say that the CRA didn't “adequately analyze or review decisions” and at the same time, “there was insufficient sharing of the results of these objections and court decisions within the Agency”.
In any department, of course there is policy, procedure, and practice. At the beginning of your report where you outlined the objections process on page 1 of report 2, you talk about how CRA manages its process through the appeals branch of the department.
At the same time, I am aware that taxpayers can also file complaints about service, and they can do that first through the CRA, and then if they are not satisfied with the result of that complaint, they can go to the taxpayers' ombudsman.
Did you have a chance to review with the taxpayers' ombudsman what happens at that level, and how effective they were or were not in helping taxpayers get their issues resolved in a timely, fair, and accurate way? I know there's been a conversation. I previously sat on the immigration committee, and in speaking to colleagues, I know that people have talked about the idea of an immigration ombudsman. I wonder if you had a chance to look at how it's working within CRA and whether or not it's helping.
I suspect many of the objectives of an ombudsman would be similar to the types of inquiries you are making into how effectively the department is running and how well it is serving Canadians.