Canada’s overly complex tax system needs to be simplified, according to the Certified General Accountants Association of Canada (CGA-Canada).
CGA-Canada has just released a study – The Need for Tax Simplification: A Challenge and an Opportunity – that highlights ways the current tax system is costing consumers, businesses and the economy both time and money in compliance requirements.
The study focuses on both the challenge of a potentially high political cost of making tax reform decisions and the opportunity to yield substantial savings.
Few attempts to simplify the tax system have been made since its creation in 1917, and the study points to the need for a review of both the personal and corporate income tax systems. CGA-Canada is calling for public debate on the issue.
Anthony Ariganello, CGA-Canada president and CEO, said Canada’s tax system is among the most complex in the world. The result, he said, is confusion, wasted time, and extra costs for business owners who don’t know how to capitalize on savings, and who are thus forced to pass additional costs onto consumers.
The federal government, Ariganello said, hasn’t made any real efforts to consciously simplify the cumbersome tax system.
“What we’ve seen is just a continued barrage of added changes and patchwork and Band-Aids to the system where we’ve introduced new policies, new measures one on top of the other and some, in fact, conflict with one another,” he said. “There’s just so many grey areas.”
Jenny Wagler
Twitter: JennyWagler_BIV