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CRA Sitting on $25.4M of Unclaimed Tax Refunds :CRA SOTW

Canada sitting on $25.4M pile of unclaimed tax refunds
Tim Shufelt, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Monday, June 09, 2008

Despite its best efforts to throw around millions in tax money, the federal government just can't seem to give it away.

Tax specialists at the Canada Revenue Agency are trying to distribute millions of dollars rightly belonging to Canadian taxpayers, with mixed success.

Over the past 12 years, more than $25.4 million in undeliverable tax returns has piled up in a government bank account. Almost 40,000 cheques, averaging $657 each, have yet to find their way back to their rightful owners.

Most commonly, tax money cannot be delivered when a person files their return, moves and forgets to provide the government with a new address.

"If you're moving, when you already have so many things you're thinking about, you have to remember to update your information with the CRA," said agency spokeswoman Catherine Jolicoeur.

Others fail to plan for their estates properly before they die. Still others simply forget to cash their cheques, Ms. Jolicoeur said. "If you finally find it in your drawer, and say, 'Oops, I didn't cash this,' you can cash it two years later, you can cash it five years later, it's not staledated."

Similarly, it's never too late for Canadians estranged from their tax refunds to arrange a reunion with their long-lost money, Ms. Jolicoeur said.

As long as they can identify themselves, individuals owed refunds can request a reissued cheque from the agency. Otherwise, the money may remain forever in a government-run orphanage for abandoned money -- a consolidated revenue account.

But the agency is not waiting for people to come forward to claim their money, she said. Once a cheque is returned to sender, one of the dozens of tax centres located across the country is tasked with keeping track of an individual's address changes.

However, privacy laws prevent the government from sharing change of address information across departments, Ms. Jolicoeur said.

Over time, however, the agency is able to whittle down the number of undeliverable cheques for each given year. For 2007, which still remains an open tax year, 11,112 refunds totalling $8.2 million remain to be sent out.

For the 1996 tax year, however, 1,001 cheques remain unclaimed, totalling $529,156.

The agency's efforts are less and less successful the longer the money sits in a bank account. In more than nine years of trying to distribute about 2,800 undeliverable tax cheques worth almost $1.2 million from 1997, for example, half of that money is still unclaimed.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2008

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