By Lucianna Ciccocioppo
Canadians confused with complicated tax laws now have a unique, free, online resource to help them navigate income tax regulations. It's the Canadian Tax Wiki Project, taxwiki.ca, founded by the Faculty of Law's Prof. Benjamin Alarie, and it's the first of its kind in Canada.
The tax wiki is a one-stop source of the latest and accessible information for taxpayers, financial planners and accountants across Canada. And the key word is latest.
"The hope is that the tax wiki will be a very current and responsive tool for Canadian taxpayers, to help them find out what their tax obligations are," says Alarie. "This helps to reduce stress, particularly at tax time, and people can make more informed decisions."
The Canadian Tax Wiki works like the popular wiki program online, where the public community can contribute, update and correct information-also known as crowd-sourcing-on Canadian tax rules and regulations, and more importantly, explain all the exceptions. Other crowd-sourcing tools, such as Wikipedia, have shown a high degree of reliability, adds Alarie.
This non-commercial site uses the tax interpretation bulletins issued by the CRA as its base. While the Auditor General of Canada found there were 1.5 million hits to these bulletins on the CRA website between April 2008 and March 2009, in its report it stated there was an unacceptable lag time for updating the information. Most of it was obsolete. "Also, the info found on there isn't easy to find," explains Alarie.
With the help of students in his tax class last semester, and with law student Julianne Gu, who had a BLG fellowship this summer to take the project to the next level, Alarie says the site is now sufficiently populated with useful, searchable information to start promoting it to the public.
Now that Google has noticed the project and started to index the site, the feedback has been "enthusiastic," says Alarie. Tax time found about 1200 hits per day on the tax wiki, he says, from a variety of people.
Ultimately, the wiki idea can be expanded to other areas of law, such as family or criminal, says Alarie, where the public needs accurate, timely and free information. "The idea is to help make the law more accessible."
And, less taxing.
