The Canada Revenue Agency revoked the status of 12 B.C.-based charities between July 2022 and January 2023, all of them connected to a recently retired Vancouver lawyer and his former company.
Revoking a charity’s status after an audit is a rare step for the CRA. In recent years, less than half of one per cent of Canada’s 86,000 registered charities have met such a fate. CRA records show that out of the 14 B.C.-based charities to have their status revoked following audits between July 2022 and January 2023, 12 can be traced back to a single office tower in downtown Vancouver and a company called Benefic Group.
The CRA said ensuring compliance with tax rules is a priority because “the charitable sector is supported by all Canadian taxpayers.” When wealthy people use charities primarily for the purpose of reducing their tax owing, the net result for Canadians is “millions of dollars … that wasn’t paid in taxes,” Bahen said. “So that means that there’s less money to pay for schools, to pay for roads, hospitals, health care, elderly supports, military veterans, social services, disability insurance.
Bromley told Postmedia News the new director general of the CRA’s charities directorate, which oversees the sector, “has chosen to clear her predecessor’s backlog of audits by simply revoking charities with little regard to the seriousness of transactions,” adding that this “draconian approach has substantially increased the number of revocations” but also resulted in several “erroneous” revocations being reversed.
“By reaching back 23 years, the new director general has been able to string together a dozen ‘Bromley-related’ revocations. Those revocations are unfortunate and unjustified,” Bromley wrote before the most recent revocations. “However, that is a less-important statistic than the fact that only five ‘Bromley-related’ donations were overturned in my 40 years of practice.”
Bromley said that while he is retired and no longer acts for most of the revoked charities, he believes “all or most will fight the revocations because, if the reasons for these revocations apply to all charities, there is a tidal shift coming to charity law and thousands of charities will face harmful revocations for transactions that have otherwise always been allowed.”
In his experience, Elawny said, the CRA wants to avoid revocation and tries to work with charities to bring them into compliance. It seems noteworthy, he said, that the CRA revoked a dozen charities in a span of a few months, all connected to a single company, for alleged non-compliance, following audits.
The CRA does not suggest any of the conduct alleged against any of the B.C. charities is criminal conduct. Christopher Richardson, a chartered accountant who worked with Bromley for decades, called Bromley a “guru” who has done innovative work in arranging charitable donations, often involving very large gifts from wealthy individuals and families.
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