Bewildered by Bureaucratic Bafflegab?

According to a recent CBC article¹,Canada Revenue Agency will be gradually retooling their correspondence after a study found that their “tax notices are so confusing, recipients are often not sure whether they owe money.”

Communications were described as “poorly organized, confusing, unprofessional, unduly severe, bureaucratic, one-sided and just plain dense.” As a result, CRA is flooded with unnecessary phone calls and letters each year from taxpayers requiring clarification or taxpayers who have had their benefits cut off without cause because they failed to understand a request for information.

Next year, CRA plans to solicit feedback from Canadians on how they can improve their communications with them and will engage a third-party consultant to rewrite the templates for common correspondence.

^{1. Dean Beeby, CBC News. “Revenue Canada’s letters full of gobbledegook, internal report finds.” Accessed October 31, 2014. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/revenue-canada-s-letters-full-of-gobbledegook-internal-report-finds-1.2814181.}