2024 Tax Season Survey Results Report
Published by Cadesky Tax | May 20, 2025
We asked CPAs what they thought of the 2024 Tax Season. Here is what they said.
Over 1,300 responses were received, with 96% saying they prepared personal tax returns.
62% favoured an extension of some kind while 22% were opposed to this. Traditionally, the reasons for not having an extension have been:
- I want to be done by April 30
- Clients will send in their information late and there will be a last-minute rush anyway, just later
But the process of completing tax returns gets harder every year, with more forms and disclosure requirements. There is a limit to how much the profession can handle, especially in April, where it is a race to the finish line.
Most people who agreed with giving some extension beyond April 30 suggested a general extension to June 15. Tax would still be payable by April 30, but the automatic late file penalty (5% plus 1% per month) would not apply. The U.S. allows extensions, and the tax owing must be estimated and paid by April 15. This may actually generate earlier payment of taxes and modest overestimates with refunds to follow. There is some wisdom in this.
Some may say that if tax has to be paid by April 30, then there is no point to an extension. But there is a difference between producing a reasonable tax estimate for payment purposes (to avoid interest) and a fully completed and accurate tax return.
A contrary view would be that a tax return can be filed by April 30 with the information available and later amended if need be.
The April 30 deadline is the most challenging for CPAs, with 52% selecting this answer. March 31, the deadline for trusts and partnerships was second at 35%. June 30, the deadline for corporate returns with December year ends, was a distant third at just 9%.
One problem with the March 31 deadline is that trust returns and partnership returns are due at the same time. Where a trust has an interest in a partnership, this creates a very difficult situation. This problem is well known, but a solution has eluded us for decades.
A second line of questioning related to the CRA portal. The “auto-fill” function could not be used reliably to populate a tax return automatically. This meant going back to manually entering slips.
In response, 75% said that this caused significant additional work and a further 18% said the process was somewhat inefficient. Clearly, this was a major issue for 2024. It was due to some additional verification steps being initiated by CRA, which caused their system to fail.
CRA gave notice of this but was unapologetic and did not feel that it was grounds for a general extension.
We did a rough calculation to see how many additional hours might have been spent due to the failure of the CRA system this year.
There were 21.6 million “taxable” personal tax returns filed in 2021 (the last year for which we have statistics). In addition, 8.4 million non-taxable returns were filed (for claiming tax credits for low-income people or where income was below personal exemptions). Assume on the 21.6 million returns, 10% had multiple slips and it took an additional ½ hour to enter slips manually on average. That means over one million hours of additional time was spent! That is a lot of time.
Add to this the need to calculate capital gains and losses for two periods, for no apparent reason. Who knows how much extra time this required?
In all, it was not a happy tax season!
There is some encouraging news. Most people use and appreciate the CRA auto-fill function. 65% said the service should be extended to include other information (e.g., donation receipts). There can only be advantages to this for all stakeholders (taxpayers, tax return preparers and CRA).
