his July, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) expanded its SimpleFile services (phone, digital, and paper) to invite more than 500,000 eligible lower-income individuals to file their return and potentially gain access to important benefit and credit payments.
This automatic tax filing national pilot targets individuals who have never filed a tax return or who have a gap in their filing history, and builds upon the success of small-scale SimpleFile pilots previously undertaken by the CRA.
In early 2024, the CRA invited more than 1.5 million individuals with a lower income or a fixed income and who are in a simple tax situation that remains unchanged from year to year to use SimpleFile by Phone, double the number from the previous year. To date, more than 90% of the invitees have filed their tax return using a variety of filing methods the CRA offers.
SimpleFile is a key Budget 2024 commitment and the CRA is on track to further increase the number of invitations to two million for tax season 2025.
From my quick search, SimpleFile appears to be a CRA technology as opposed to one leased from an external corporation - so, yay that bit is done within-house. The program focuses on disadvantaged individuals and essentially competes with (predatory) commercial tax preparation services. I don't really mean this as a partisan comment, but this is what good government looks like in my eyes - working for the people to grow the country in a good direction. It sounds very effective too
Yeah, it really is odd that so many people have to use a commercial third party for taxes when the vast majority of people have very simple situations.