Article content

I was chatting with a colleague last week about tax season. “We’ll get it done,” he said. “But given the shortage of qualified teammates, it’s going to be tough. At least we don’t have the chaos of the last three years from the government … so far. Knock on wood.”

Article content

Knock on wood, that’s the state of tax administration in 2026: cautious relief and significant shortages of staff. But my colleague is right. Mercifully, the debacles of the last three years are non-existent this year: no capital gains inclusion rate fiasco, no bare trust uncertainty and no underused housing tax confusion, which was thankfully eliminated for 2025 in the last federal budget. The last three years of avoidable, policy-induced disorder were dumped onto a profession already running on fumes.

Article content

Article content

Article content

Is the silence indicative of a healthy tax system? No. More accountants are scrambling and simply hoping to get through tax season with minimal collateral damage. The shortage of qualified accountants is a structural problem that the chaos years obscured and a calmer tax season will not fix. The people inside the system are absorbing the strain, so you don’t have to see the cracks.

Article content

Article content

Article content

Yet there are still shortages. The problem is a structural one and it’s not difficult to find the roots. The average Canadian accountant is 47 years old, five years older than the average worker overall. Why does that matter? It means retirements will hit the accounting profession sooner than most. In short, the accounting profession is not replacing itself when you consider entrants to the profession versus exits — retirements and deaths.

Article content

Article content

Universities and colleges across North America report declining enrolment in accounting programs. The pool of accounting graduates in the United States has contracted every year since 2015-16 and was down 7.4 per cent in 2021-22, 9.6 per cent in 2022-23 and 6.6 per cent in 2023-24.

Article content

Article content

The bleeding may be slowing, but the wound is not closed. It’s obvious students are attracted to other professions. Why? Tax and accounting are not viewed as sexy professions. I think it is, but maybe I’m weird?

Article content

The gap opening up is concentrated precisely where individual Canadians and small business owners need help most: tax planning and related compliance.

Article content

Will automatic tax filing and artificial intelligence (AI) help out? Automatic tax filing, especially the long-overdue expanded version that appears to be on its way, will take a load off certain low-income taxpayers and hopefully eliminate the need for tax preparers for those people. But it won’t materially impact the vast majority of accountants and the taxpayers they serve for quite some time yet.

Article content

Some AI providers are trumpeting that they can prepare tax returns — especially in the U.S. — but it will be a bit more time before AI can confidently prepare tax returns that can take a load off a strained profession.