This year the Ukrainian Canadian Congress - Manitoba hosted the Free Tax Clinic that filed 543 tax returns for Ukrainians who arrived in Manitoba in 2022 under the CUAET measures.
In December 2022, approximately 8,000 Ukrainians needed to file their income taxes in 2023. The free tax clinic handled almost 7% of the estimated volume.
Although this number may seem a bit low, we started with only six volunteers in a "pilot mode" to understand whether our community organization could successfully handle this project, and what tools, knowledge, and skills we need.
What was done during this pilot:
- Conducted five webinars on personal income taxes and taxation in Canada with Canada Revenue Agency - Agence du revenu du Canada. More than 1,500 people attended these webinars.
- All volunteers had to take extensive training on how to file personal income tax returns diving deep into details. This training following actual work at the clinic helped a few volunteers to define their career path.
- We integrated a booking system for appointments. Whereas the system handled all the workflows and scheduling, it had major performance issues in the first few days when hundreds of people were trying to book appointments. The system will be replaced for the next tax season.
- Whereas the initial intention was to have only online appointments, we noticed interest in in-person services and set up a workplace at the UCC Manitoba office. At least 10% of all filings were done in the office.
Plans for the next tax season:
- Continue educational webinars on the taxation system with CRA.
- Issue a call for volunteers in November so they could attend a 9-week training on personal income taxes.
- Scale up by engaging more volunteers to the UCC Manitoba free tax clinic. Manitoba has welcomed more than 19,000 Ukrainians since 2022, so the free tax clinic will need more help.
- Share our experience and lessons learned with other Ukrainian-Canadian organizations so they could look into setting up free tax clinics across Canada.
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