Canadian government response to TEI's SBRN submission.

• Author: Manicom, Richard N.
• Position: Tax Executives Institute, single business registration number

On June 25, 1993, Richard N. Manicom, Assistant Deputy Minister, Information Technology Branch of Revenue Canada, Customs, Excise and Taxation wrote the following letter to J. Lawrence Martin, the Institute's Vice President-Region I. Mr. Manicom's letter responds to TEI's May 25 letter on the Canadian government's proposed Single Business Registration Number initiative, which is reprinted elsewhere in this issue.

Thank you for the letter from your colleague of May 25, 1993, concerning the Single Business Registration Number (SBRN) addressed to my colleagues Messrs. Burpee and Roy. I am responding to the letter as the Revenue Canada executive responsible for the project. The thoughtful comments of knowledgeable professionals such as the Tax Executives Institute on this important issue are much appreciated. We had already noted the suggestions made at the meeting your Toronto chapter had with our regional officials on April 7, 1993. I trust that Roderick Quiney was able to shed some further light on the project during his meeting with you in Calgary on June 3, 1993.

The SBRN will allow Revenue Canada to improve the way we do business with business by changing our approach to client oriented from program centred. Use of the SBRN will permit us to reduce the compliance burden for many Canadian businesses, as well as our administrative overhead. We recognize that "one size fits all" is no longer an acceptable strategy; consequently we are considering offering businesses options from a menu, as we do for individuals with the various T1 forms. Revenue Canada has a number of service improvements underway, which will not all be of interest to all our clients. For example, most of those interested in the use of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) are large organizations. From our consultations to date, we anticipate that an option to consolidate GST and Payroll source deductions would be of interest only to small companies. By offering a choice of "tailored" services, we can make Canada's revenue administration the most effective possible for each segment of the Canadian economy.

In order to minimize the costs to business, we have given advance notice of the transition timetable and allowed a two-year period for the conversion. Companies can convert all their accounts to SBRN at a single time of their choosing in this period. If Revenue Canada is to capture operating efficiencies, we cannot continue to run two systems indefinitely, which is...