Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Rewarding failure

I've already discussed Sheila Fraser's criticism of the Canada Revenue Agency's collection department. Now, CTV reports that rather than trying to make changes to an unsatisfactory system, the Cons plan instead to hand even more duties to the CRA, transferring responsibility for the collection of student-loan debt which currently lies with Service Canada:
The collection agency contracts were signed while the Liberals were in government. The Conservatives have taken steps to transfer responsibility for collecting the loans from Service Canada to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).

Diane Finley, the Minister of Human Resources and Development, says transferring the loans to the CRA will be more "efficient" and should cut down on the frequency with which the federal government has to hire collection agencies.
From a principled standpoint, I'd generally agree with a move to keep government functions within government. And based on the way private collection agencies have treated student-loan recipients quoted in the article, there are plenty of reasons to look for a better way to collect on the loans.

But while the general principle would support keeping the function in government, there's always the matter of who should perform the function and how. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to suggest that any reasonable mechanism for collecting debt should lie somewhere between merely writing letters then writing the debt off (as the CRA seems wont to do), and hounding debtors over matters as trivial as a changed phone number (as one private collection agency is noted to have done). And it's the government that has the capacity to ensure that such a mechanism is created - preferably by making needed changes to the CRA.

Unfortunately, the Cons' selective attention doesn't seem to have taken into account Fraser's actual criticisms...with the end result that they seem perfectly happy to reward a department which apparently hasn't done anything to fix its own decade-old problems. And that can only mean that the agency's current ineffectiveness will have all the more impact on government receipts in the future.

No comments:

Post a Comment