January 31, 2012
Here is a copy of my submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance on Motion 559 dealing with transparency.
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January 30, 2012
Here is the Blumbergs’ Canadian Charity Law List - January 2012
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January 28, 2012
For a number of years CRA has been aggressively targeting charities that are involved with abusive tax shelter schemes or in serious non-compliance with their legal obligations under the Income Tax Act. In some cases CRA puts out a news release but that only provides a small amount of detail as to the concerns of the regulator. Anyone can request from CRA copies of letters sent by the Charities Directorate to a charity which provide a lot more detailed information. Here are copies of news releases and more importantly in some cases the letters from CRA to the charity.
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Posted by Mark Blumberg on 01/28 |
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Canadian Charity Statistics
StatsCan recently published some statistics on charitable giving. They noted “Canadian taxfilers reported making charitable donations of just under $8.3 billion in 2010, up 6.5% from 2009. At the same time, the number of donors increased 2.2% to just over 5.7 million. Data are based on income tax returns filed for 2010.” That is a bit of a good news story and shows that many Canadians who have jobs feels quite lucky and are generally digging into their pockets more. What is interesting and not discussed by StatsCan is that Canadian charities according to their T3010 filings issued about $13 billion in donation receipts. Why then almost a 5 billion dollars difference between the T3010 filings and the personal income tax returns? Many Canadians gave under $200 and did not claim any amount on their return. Some donations came from corporations and not personal taxfilers. Also maybe some who gave over $200 did not keep their receipts or did not think it was important to file them. Perhaps the tax benefits of donating to registered charities are less important to some than to others.
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January 27, 2012
There are a couple of interesting websites which allow much easier searching of information from the T3010 databases. One is CharityFocus.ca (discussed at http://www.globalphilanthropy.ca/index.php/blog/comments/charity_focus_from_imagine_canada_-_a_helpful_tool_to_analyze_canadian_char/ ). Another interesting website is http://www.opencharity.ca Opencharity.ca allows for visitors to search not only by charity name but also directors name.
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January 26, 2012
Alice Holt, the Head of Legal Services for the London office of the Charity Commission of England and Wales will be speaking at CLIP “Being Good at Doing Good” Conference in Toronto, which is being held February 13 and 14. We are delighted to have Alice join us.
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January 25, 2012
Imagine Canada will be officially launching its Charity Focus website soon. You can review the website at http://www.charityfocus.ca/
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January 24, 2012
The CRA has published Charity Connection No. 11 on the 2011 Federal Budget. The publication highlights some of the major changes for registered charities, RCAAAs and other qualified donees. There will be more information on certain other budgetary provisions in the near future such as the “ineligible individual” provisions..
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Ontario tax litigator, Natalie Worsfold, has an interesting blog called “Trouble with Taxes”. She has a page on the GLGI gifting arrangement. Of particular note is the lengthy PDF of court documents.
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The CRA has revoked for cause “Word of Christ Ministry” and “Hope Church of God Deliverance Ministries” for involvement in promoted charity schemes.
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