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It’s a shocking thing, especially to be reporting now as Canadians are gearing up to pay their taxes

Next week’s auditor general report on the CRA follows up on a scathing 2006 audit on the agency’s tax collection strategies, that highlighted a number of concerns and recommendations for improvement, including how to better collect the tax debts owed by Canadians.

An analysis conducted by Postmedia News finds the CRA’s total tax debt has grown more than 60% since the last audit to $29-billion in 2011-12, from $18-billion in the 2004-05 fiscal year. (The former Liberal government also struggled on the file, as total tax debt grew 88% between 1996-97 and 2004-05).

Total tax debt includes taxes and other revenues assessed or estimated over several years by the CRA but not yet collected.

Also, the ratio of tax debt to total cash receipts, which is a trend indicator of how well the revenue agency is managing tax debt, increased to 6.9% in 2011-12, compared with 5.4% identified in the last audit. That means the agency’s tax debt continues to grow at a faster rate than the cash collected.

“It’s a shocking thing, especially to be reporting now as Canadians are gearing up to pay their taxes,” NDP national revenue critic Murray Rankin said about the tax debt data.

“This government is not taking care of one of the basic functions of government, which is to collect revenues, and that cascades indisputably into service cuts.”

While the uncollected tax debt has grown, so, too, has the amount of tax debt collected or resolved by the agency. For the 2011-12 year, the CRA resolved $40-billion in outstanding tax debts (including billions of dollars in write-offs) — an increase of more than $10-billion in debts resolved over the past few years.