There are many advantages for Canadian charities filing their T3010 online, as we have discussed numerous times. But how many Canadian registered charities are using the online system?
We recently received data from the Charities Directorate for the fiscal 2023-2024 (April 2023 to March 2024) and partial data from 2024 to 2025 (April 2024 to September 21, 2024) CRA fiscal years.
In 2023/24 about 20,842 T3010 were filed electronically. Some of the T3010s relate to previous years, like 2016 or 2018, and some groups may have therefore filed multiple returns in one year, but mostly, they are for 2022 and 2023, as one would expect. Importantly, if one ignores the few filings outside the normal, the 20,842 represents almost 25% of Canadian charities that are filing T3010s. This is better than I thought and a good omen. CRA should be congratulated for getting a lot of charities on the online system, which was only launched mid-2019. Also it shows that Canada charities are not hopeless when it comes to digital transformation.
All Canadian charities should be filing their T3010s online, and in the US, which is a much more complicated system, all Form 990s are filed online now. If the US can do that for 1.5m forms, Canada can and will do that, for 86,000 charities. The cost of manually inputting lots of forms is simply too great, and the delay in the public having access to the information is problematic when better methods exist.
In 2024/25, which is only partial and involves 14,093 filings over 6 months, there appears to be a further uptick, but it is hard to compare the years. For example, in June 2023/24, there were 6800 filings, and in June 2024/25, there were 7,209 filings.
Let us hope that there is a further uptick in the usage of the online filing system for T3010 filings and other interactions with CRA.