Let’s be honest, we have all had tax problems, we where never taught how to do them so we pay someone to do them who charges us hundreds, to them have the government tell us they are wrong, we have called the CRA to wait on hold for 3 hours, we all pay alot so the government can spend how they wish. Its a messier, it could be smoother, the process could be automated, we all want to pay less taxes.
The reason the goverment wants us to do our taxes its because it wants us to be honest about our income, specifically self employed individuals.
I canada we have about 30 millions tax paying individuals, and about 1.3 million businesses. The average bill to do your taxes is 150 bucks, so thats 4.7 billion dollars just to do taxes, not counting CRA and provincial revenus agencies. your talking abt 12-15 billion dollars a year just to run the tax system. Not counting the time citizens spend doing taxes and understanding them. Its a huge waste of money and time, its counts for 5% of our yearly budget.
Canada is essentially a bank, it deals in commerce with other countries, why not locally. The government of Canada gives everyone a tax number, why not give businesses a bank account to do all business transaction, using the bank of canada. When you long into the CRA you can actually merge your account with like 10 institutions, its a disaster to manage. I know people will hesistate with this, because people dont trust the government. I get that, but its time to change that perspective. If we could lower taxes, why would we not want that. This would streamline taxes, as no one would have to do them, this would also remove the need for the CRA at its current capacity, as well it would lower everyones taxes and time. Canada can already access people banks, even the CRA guy I spoke to today for 3 hours, told me it wasn’t such a bad idea as we couldn’t get my bank account linked to my account for auto payments.
The government would be happy as they would get the right amount and people would be trying to cheap the systems or write everything off. People could get paid for business transactions, and expenses using one account, your personal account would be different. This would only be an account to do business with, and would be free, and you wouldn’t have to do any taxes. For the people saying people will just take cash, that already happens we all know that, we could simply make a decent fine for the person paying and the business that taking the cash without claiming it. I think if we all payed less taxes we would want to avoid paying them less. Example if taxes where just 10%, and we knew the goverment was doing right with them, we would all be ok with paying our fair share. People scam taxes all the time, we pay to much taxes and well the current system is dated and need refinement. This could easily be done, as banking system already exist, really it kinda an obvious solution if you ask me.