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You might expect a tax professional like myself to defend the annual ritual of filing tax returns, but I don’t because it has become a necessary evil that serves almost no one well, especially with the shortage of accountants and increased complexity. Most would rather visit the dentist than complete their tax return.

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Adam Smith, the Scottish economist who espoused the four tenets (fairness, certainty, convenience and efficiency) of a good taxation system in his 1776 landmark book, The Wealth of Nations, would recognize that Canada has significant problems with all four maxims. But convenience — that tax should be levied in the manner most convenient to the contributor — is the one our system most spectacularly fails.

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There is little policy justification for forcing taxpayers with simple affairs to spend time and money on compliance by purchasing software or paying a tax preparer. Most practitioners I know would say the same.

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Yet the cash benefits Canada delivers through the tax system such as child benefits, GST credits and others only flow to those who file, which means non-filing is self-inflicted hardship for the people least able to bear it. Sparing them the maze is a genuine good.

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That’s one of the reasons why I’ve long been an advocate for automatic tax filing. Other countries, like the United Kingdom, have spared most taxpayers from filing for decades. Canada has not ever had such a system other than its low-pickup Simple File and its predecessors, all a far cry from automatic tax filing.

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So I was pleased when the federal government announced in its November budget that it was finally taking a real step towards automatic tax filing. But, of course, the devil would be in the details, which arrived in Bill C-31 last month. For the first time, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) will be permitted to prepare and file a return on a person’s behalf — a “deemed filing,” in the jargon.

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To be eligible, an individual must be living (deceased returns do not qualify), be a resident of Canada for the entire year, have no tax payable (thus not attracting any late filing penalties since the return will be filed after the normal filing deadline and penalties are computed as a percentage of tax payable), draw all income from sources already reported to the CRA on information slips and have skipped filing in at least one of the three prior years. They get a notice and 90 days to review or opt out. Silence means the CRA files for them.

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But there are flaws with the legislation. For example, the 90-day window to respond is far too short for a population that has historically been disengaged from filing. It should be longer — say, 180 days.

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The proposed subsection 150(1.6) deems any error the taxpayer fails to flag within the 90-day window to be “a misrepresentation made by the individual.” A disengaged, low-income non-filer who ignores a CRA letter — precisely the population targeted — can be deemed to have misrepresented a return they never prepared, potentially opening the year to reassessment indefinitely.