CRA Delisted Multiple Charities After Misplacing Paperwork: Report

A sign outside the Canada Revenue Agency office in Ottawa on May 10, 2021. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) deregistered at least eight charities after misplacing the annual filings they submitted, which prevented those organizations from being able to issue charitable tax receipts to donors, according to a report.

“The notice of intention to revoke sent to the charity listed because it had not met the filing requirement of the Income Tax Act was published in error,” said the CRA in a statement obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter.

While the agency did not disclose the total number of groups that were mistakenly deregistered due to this error, it’s known that all of the charities affected had filed their annual tax returns by paper, and eight are known to have been deregistered for as long as 11 months.

The CRA misplaced their returns and then proceeded to rule that they were in breach of the Income Tax Act, which requires charities to file their annual financial statements with the agency every year.

The decision resulted in those organizations being stripped of their charitable status.

The eight affected organizations were the Buddhist Monastery BBM Society of Burnaby, B.C.; Heartwood Place of Cambridge, Ont.; Gospel Fellowship Church of Iron Bridge, Ont.; Hope Without Borders of Montréal; Wainfleet Township Public Library Board of Wainfleet, Ont.; the Wesley United Church of Quill Lake, Sask.; and two of Canada’s best-known charities, the Manitoba Curling Hall of Fame in Winnipeg and the Toronto Kiwanis T.P. Loblaw Charitable Trust.

“We were no longer able to issue charitable receipts,” a representative of one of the organizations told Blacklock’s Reporter, which interviewed several directors, treasurers, and managers of those charities and kept their identities anonymous as requested.

“They lost the file,” said another charity executive. “It was a nuisance. We had always filed by paper and they lost the file.”

Complaints

This news broke just a month after Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson Francois Boileau said the CRA received a record number of complaints in the last fiscal year.

“The 2021–2022 fiscal year is yet another banner year for our office. Our team has received more complaints than ever before,” Boileau told reporters in Ottawa on Dec. 13.

The ombudsperson said the CRA received a total of 3,847 complaints during the year, representing an increase of over 70 percent from the previous year, or double the number of pre-pandemic complaints.

“Some complainants told us that agents were unable to provide a specific timeframe for processing their application, would refuse to identify themselves, or sometimes even hung up on them,” he said.

Boileau added that his office notified the agency about the high complaint numbers and gave it time to settle the issue on its own, but it did not.

“Our office sent 1,746 urgent requests to the CRA for processing, an increase of 130 percent compared to 2020–2021, which was already another record year.”