Erin Foggoa spent three years navigating fees, lost letters and hours on hold in her bid to secure the disability tax credit, writes Heather Scoffield. Her story shows a system desperately in need of reform.
By Heather Scoffield
Once upon a time, federal officials believed the Disability Tax Credit system was designed to be simple and efficient.
It was meant to be a single certification point that would ensure people like 46-year-old Erin Foggoa could follow a straight path from applying to be eligible for the DTC to receiving an array of income supports as warranted.
But for Foggoa, her experience is exactly the opposite of simple and efficient. Instead, her three-year dance with the DTC has taken her from paying thousands of dollars in assessment fees, a rejection letter sent to the wrong address, a complete redo, hours on hold with the Canada Revenue Agency, wrong information, contradictory information, lost information; and finally an exasperated access-to-information request on herself in a last-ditch attempt to figure out what went so repeatedly wrong.
“I was extremely frustrated,” the single mother of two said in a phone interview from Nanaimo, B.C.
Foggoa is persistent, but any one of those barriers would prompt most of us to abandon the process. And in fact, just 17 per cent of those who start the digital application process for the DTC actually finish and press “send,” according to new research from the Canadian Tax Observatory.
Ten barriers blocking access to benefits
Researchers pinpointed 10 different links in the application process where problems loom so large that they drive applicants away. From lack of awareness to filling out forms to finding a medical practitioner to paying for diagnosis, the process — at least for many applicants — is onerous, repetitive and often demeaning.
And since DTC certification is the key to a wide range of income supports, applicants who are squeezed out of the access chain before they get to the end miss out on important benefits such as the $204-a-month Canada Disability Benefit.
That’s a major problem for the state of Canada’s economy.
Disability and poverty in Canada — by the numbers
Canadians with disabilities experience poverty at disproportionately high rates: more than 37 per cent of people living in poverty in Canada have a disability, and over 1.2 million people with disabilities live below the poverty line.
Foggoa is working full time now, but last year, she made just $8,000. She and her two children found themselves at the food bank a couple of times. Rent is high, and she still has no DTC in hand to apply for other government supports.
“I’m almost always about $1,000 behind,” she says.
The thing is, the federal government knows the disability support process is thick with barriers. Reports from charitable networks have been explaining this in great detail for years. Government advisory bodies and senior officials have all made note of the issues, privately and in reports. And the government’s own Spring Economic Update in April recognized there were pitfalls, making some technical changes.
But many of the barriers remain.
“Its most important conclusion is easy to pass over, because it is stated so plainly. The burden of obtaining the DTC is cumulative. A person does not encounter a single obstacle and either overcome it or be prevented from continuing,” says Shaun Illington, principal of DFFRNT, a user-centred design consultancy, who analyzed the findings in detail.
A more efficient system is possible
What’s obvious from the research? If government did some in-depth polling to find out exactly how many people are falling out at each step, and why, they could go about making technical fixes to repair the system.
But there’s another obvious point: the access chain is so problematic that it cries out for a more profound overhaul.
So, the Tax Observatory modelled and quantified what a more efficient and expansive system could look like. The results are thought-provoking.
The analysis by Gillian Petit from the University of Calgary looks at what would happen if DTC accreditation were automatically granted to people who had already jumped through the bureaucratic hoops to qualify for provincial disability assistance or Canada Pension Plan disability support.
If that same population were simply presumed eligible for certification, about 673,000 new people would be granted DTC accreditation. Of them, up to 53,000 would be lifted above the poverty line primarily because they would now be able to apply for the Canada Disability Benefit.
As a result, poverty among disability assistance recipients would fall to 42 per cent from 49 per cent. That’s significant.
Add in automatic eligibility for those who already qualify for CPP-disability, and poverty would drop further.
It’s not a magic wand. Provinces don’t have a single standard for who qualifies for disability assistance, so people in some provinces would benefit far more than others.
And that’s why the Observatory is going to take its research a step further.
We are in the process of designing a new way for low-income people with disabilities to efficiently access the benefits they have a right to — a way that is compatible with the Accessible Canada Act and that won’t lean on a distantly related tax credit that was meant to be a gateway but stands in the way.
Nothing about this is simple. But with a quarter of Canada’s working age population with a disability of some kind, and with the poverty rate among people with disabilities double that of their nondisabled peers, it’s very clear that fine-tuning is not enough.
