The next time you puzzle over an indecipherable letter or notice from the Canada Revenue Agency, don't blame yourself: even the tax department acknowledges it churns out a lot of gobbledygook.
A study of the agency last month confirms the millions of communications that bureaucrats send to taxpayers each year are poorly organized, confusing, unprofessional, unduly severe, bureaucratic, one-sided and just plain dense.
All that gibberish comes with a human cost: confused taxpayers swamp the agency's call centres with needless telephone inquiries, or they send thousands of letters to tax offices asking for clarification.
And Canadians who receive government benefit cheques sometimes get cut off without cause because they don't understand the unintelligible letters the agency sends to them asking for information.
The findings appear in an internal evaluation of the 130 million pieces of mail that tax officials issue each year to businesses, charitable groups and individual taxpayers, virtually all of it through Canada Post rather than electronically.
A New York-based consultant firm hired to examine a cross-section of CRA's letters found the "information was not well organized, (the) presentation of information did not inspire confidence; and (the) tone used lacked empathy."
The evaluation included an online survey of taxpayers by another firm, which asked respondents to examine a typical CRA notice that required the recipient to send the tax agency money. About half of those surveyed could not figure out they were supposed to write a cheque to the government because the document was so poorly written.
Worse, many of those surveyed claimed they understood the sample document when in fact they did not, says the $90,000 survey from TNS Canada Ltd.
The study also compared the CRA's standard communications with those of the Internal Revenue Service in the United States, which in July 2008 began a major initiative to improve the clarity and accuracy of its correspondence.
American versions clearly indicated that the taxpayer owed the government money, while the CRA equivalents were confusing, with long preambles and weak presentation. The agency's correspondence also compared poorly with tax letters and notices in Australia, Britain and the province of Quebec.
The evaluation blames the problem partly on older letter-generating software at the CRA that offers bureaucrats little flexibility in customizing or improving their communications.
