If it wasn’t for our government, I don’t know if I’d have nearly as much material on here as I do. That, of course, does not excuse the several months I tend to go before I put material on here, but you know.
The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has something of a… we’ll call it a paperwork problem. Like the rest of the government, the left hand rarely knows what the right hand’s doing. Unlike the rest of the government, sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the right hands doing. And sometimes, the right hand kills people.
A Winnipeg senior has been declared dead by Canada Revenue Agency twice in a period of 10 months, even though she’s alive and living in a personal care home.
This is the second time in 10 months that Dave Gibeault, the woman’s son, has received a letter addressed to the “Estate of the late Mary Gibeault.”
“If I told you once, I told you twice” seems fittingly appropriate here. And the CRA has been told. Twice. Just in case–because it’s true–they didn’t hear it the first time.
“It took several weeks and a whole lot of frustration [to get her reclassified as alive]. Hours and hours and hours on the phone, and lost income as a result,” Gibeault said, noting that he had to provide proof that he has power of attorney twice.
And the shmuck who screwed it up the first time is, shall we say, very much still earning a pretty nifty paycheck for their efforts, just in case you were curious about the state of our federal employment situation.
I’m not one of these anti-government taxation is theft type people, and yeah okay mistakes happen, but when those mistakes have legal/financial consequences for people who were nowhere near the mistake when it was being made, and who’s only real involvement in the mistake was having to pay the eventual bill it generated if not corrected, that… that’s a problem. Apparently it’s a long-standing problem at that, at least as of 2018. On the up side, I suppose, at least that problem’s slowly–ever so slowly–getting better. On the down side, though, should we really be borrowing ideas from movies?