With all data moving to the cloud these days and ubiquitous online access to banking, customer and supplier portals, it makes sense that Revenue Canada (CRA) and Revenue Quebec (RQ) have followed suit. Considerable resources have been spent by the revenue agencies on developing their online portals and encouraging both individual taxpayers and businesses to move the majority of their tax related interactions online (almost every accountant conference has an appearance by a CRA representative talking about the improvements to their online portal and imploring accountants to convince their clients to make the switch). The upfront investment has resulted in significant cost savings for CRA/RQ (postage costs alone have dropped dramatically) while improving accuracy and perhaps most importantly increasing the effectiveness of tax collection efforts. CRA personnel have been able to move away from verifying calculations and manually reviewing tax returns to more value added analysis which has allowed them to identify tax miscreants with higher accuracy.

For both the individual taxpayer and small business owner there are numerous benefits to registering online: