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Canada Revenue Agency's Action Task Force on Small Business Issues

April 2007

The Canada Revenue Agency's (CRA) Action Task Force on Small Business Issues was created at the request of the Honourable Carol Skelton, Minister of National Revenue. Its mandate was to identify which of the CRA's administrative practices imposed the greatest burden on small businesses, develop solutions to reduce the burden, and introduce a systemic approach to burden reduction across the CRA.

The Action Task Force was an innovative joint public/private sector task force composed of senior CRA officials, small business owners, representatives from Industry Canada, and representatives from a number of key organizations, such as:

• the Canadian Federation of Independent Business
• the Canadian Payroll Association
• the Canadian Chamber of Commerce
• the Joint Committee on Taxation of The Canadian Bar Association and The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants
• CCH Canadian Limited
• the Certified General Accountants Association of Canada
• l'Association de planification fiscale et financière, and
• the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario.

The Action Task Force members identified the main sources of compliance burden from a variety of sources including survey results, and presentations from both private sector and public sector officials. The members received presentations from key CRA program managers, inter-government stakeholders such as the Department of Finance, Service Canada, Industry Canada and the Advisory Committee on Paperwork Burden Reduction and from private sector small business representatives.

The Action Task Force's report, Helping Small Businesses by Reducing the Compliance Burden , identifies concrete actions to be undertaken by the CRA to tangibly reduce the compliance burden on small businesses and support the achievement of the federal government's burden reduction targets. These initiatives will focus on three specific areas.

The CRA will:

1. Simplify, improve, and, where appropriate, reduce the frequency of small business interactions with the CRA.
2. Improve how and when we communicate with small businesses.
3. Make burden reduction systemic within the CRA.

Specific measures to reduce the compliance burden on small businesses include:

• reducing the number of tax filings and remittances for more than 350,000 small businesses across Canada.
• reducing the paperwork burden by as much as 20%.
• enhancing our electronic services so that businesses can do more on their schedule, not ours. Forms will be made electronic, so that busy business owners will not have to close up their shops to go to the post office.
• reviewing our forms to simplify them and streamline the information requested.
• analyzing the most common errors made by small business and take proactive measures to reduce them. For example, Small Business Information Seminars are already underway.
• continuing with our targeted advertising program for businesses.
• approaching the provinces to include trade schools in our outreach activities. We hope to have something in place within a year.
• simplifying forms for the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program and also reducing the processing time.

The CRA is committed to implementing all of the action items identified in this report and sustaining the focus on burden reduction in the years to come in a manner consistent with its overall accountability for tax compliance, revenue collection and taxation data collection.

The report is available on the CRA website at www.cra.gc.ca

A list of the members of the CRA's Action Task Force on Small Business Issues is attached.

Related document:

• News release: The Minister of National Revenue announced the Canada Revenue Agency's Action Task Force on Small Business Issues Report: Helping Small Businesses by Reducing the Compliance Burden

This document is also available for download in PDF format.

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Date modified:

2014-12-03