Fewer collection centres for CRA

The Canada Revenue Agency has issued relocation letters to 549 of its Ottawa area employees, representing about five per cent of the agency’s local workforce.

The move was prompted by CRA’s decision to shift work to other sites across the country — part of a streamlining effort that will see nine tax-processing centres across the country reduced to seven more specialized sites.

About 1,300 CRA employees at the moment work at two processing and collection sites locally — the Ottawa Technology Centre and the International and Ottawa Tax Services Office.

Forty-two per cent of these workers (the 549) have been given the option of moving to the CRA’s other centres, or accepting another position inside a 40-kilometre radius within the capital region “where there is employment availability”. The notified employees have six months to decide.

Four of the remaining processing centres are in Winnipeg, Sudbury, Ont., Jonquière, Que., and Summerside, P.E.I. Three other centres are being converted into collection centres that will have the job of verifying documents and separating them into simple and complex tax files. They are in Surrey, B.C., St. John’s, N.L., and Shawinigan, Que.

The CRA is one of the government’s largest employers, with 40,000 workers across the country and 12,000 (full-time equivalents) in the capital region. In response to a Citizen query, the agency said it “will maintain a presence of over 10,000 full-time equivalents” in the region.

The shift of 549 employees from Ottawa-Gatineau (assuming they all choose to move) is expected to take place over “two to three years” according to CRA. Since the number of full-time equivalents will fall by 2,000, this suggests the agency also intends to squeeze the size of its workforce through attrition.

This, in turn, would make it more difficult for affected CRA employees to find employment locally if they prefer not to relocate. jbagnall@postmedia.com twitter.com/JamesBagnall1