The CRA is committing themselves to determining which areas within the department in respect to information services that they need to make more assessable.   Then to continue with this they will attempt to make these easier to understand.    As it has been noticed in the last year or so the tax department is really trying to get people to use their web services more so to further encourage this they are going to make it an easier process.

They still aren’t going to totally do away with written materials and their plan is to focus on this as well.

So from the business person’s perspective how does this help you as a business person? The answer of course will depend on your scope of business. You may think that the size of your business may have something to do with it, but when it comes to tax matters every business has some type of tax responsibility, just on different scales.

The CRA perceives this first step as a solution for businesses to be able to tend to their tax matters in less time because the system will contain more information which would clarify a lot of issues, and be easier to access which would save time. This is probably viewed as being an incentive for not putting off your tax matters which in turn is going to be beneficial to the tax department. They are going to have less hassles of chasing after businesses for information or correcting mistakes. So on the surface it looks like a win-win situation.

Think about the times during the course of a business year that you have had to refer to guides to assist you. Perhaps it’s been for payroll. It can take hours deciphering all of the information or to find exactly what you are looking for which may have been just for an answer to a quick question. This is costing you time. If you have a payroll department then it’s costing you money too, as your employees have to spend their time performing this task.

So in summary the goal of the CRA in this step one action plan is to make tax information easier to understand, quicker to access and be more informative.

If this comes into play then it’s going to possibly mean for you that you are going to have less errors to have to attend to when working with your tax accountant at the end of the year.