APPENDICES

A1: Tax Expenditures

Introduction

A tax expenditure is the reduction in revenues from delivering government programs or benefits through the tax system rather than through voted budget appropriations. Tax expenditures are usually made by offering special tax rates, exemptions, or tax credits. Governments introduce tax expenditures primarily to achieve social policy objectives such as transfers to lower income families or to promote economic development and job creation.

Reporting tax expenditures improves government accountability by providing a more complete picture of government activities. The tax expenditure appendix outlines major tax expenditures for the 2003/04 fiscal year. It does not include tax expenditures introduced or expanded in Budget 2004. These are described in Part Two: Revenue Measures.

The Role of Tax Expenditure Programs

Using the tax system to deliver programs can reduce administration costs and compliance costs for recipients. In certain situations, the tax system allows intended beneficiaries to be readily identified from information that is already collected. In these cases setting up a separate expenditure program would result in costly overlap and duplication of effort. An example is the provincial sales tax credit, which is delivered through the income tax system. If this were a direct provincial expenditure program, a provincial agency or office would have to be established to duplicate much of the work already done by the Canada Revenue Agency. In addition, it would require individuals to undertake a separate, time-consuming application process in order to qualify for the benefit.

There are, however, several potential drawbacks to tax expenditure programs. First, their overall cost often receives less public scrutiny than is the case for spending programs because annual budget appropriations by the legislature are not typically required. Second, tax expenditure programs do not always effectively target those who are intended to benefit from them. Some expenditure programs that are intended to provide tax relief for low income earners may, in reality, confer the greatest benefit on high income earners who pay the most taxes. Sales tax exemptions, for example, often provide a greater absolute benefit to those with higher incomes because they have more to spend on consumer products. Finally, costs are often more difficult to control under a tax expenditure program because the benefits tend to be more open ended and enforcement is often more difficult than for spending programs.

Tax Expenditure Reporting

Not all tax reductions, credits and exemptions are classed as tax expenditures. Three criteria were used to choose those features of the tax system that should be reported as tax expenditures.

First, the emphasis is on tax reductions, exemptions and refunds that are close equivalents to spending programs. By implication, the list does not include tax measures designed to meet broad tax policy objectives such as improving fairness in the tax system, or measures designed to simplify the administration of the tax. The list also does not include items that are generally excluded from a particular tax base. For example, most services are excluded from provincial sales taxes, which are primarily designed to apply to purchases of goods.

Second, revenues raised under provincial government authority that are turned over to agencies outside of government are not reported as tax expenditures in this appendix. This includes, for example, the hotel room tax revenues transferred to Tourism BC.

Third, smaller items of less than $2 million are not included. Where practical, smaller items have been presented together as an aggregate figure.

British Columbia Tax Expenditure Programs

The following tables report 2003/04 tax expenditure estimates.

For presentation purposes, British Columbia tax expenditures have been broken into three broad categories.

• Social and Income Transfer Programs (Table A1.1): These include tax expenditures that are offered as part of government's mix of health, education, housing, income transfer and family related programs. Examples include the BC Family Bonus, the home owner grant, the sales tax exemption for children's clothing and the income tax credit for medical expenses.
• Economic Development and Business Assistance Programs (Table A1.2): This category includes tax preferences for small businesses and measures to encourage new private sector investment.
• Environmental Protection Programs (Table A1.3): There are relatively few tax expenditures in this category because environmental protection is now generally based on the principle of "polluter pay", such as the tire tax and battery levies. However, environmental tax expenditures include, for example, a sales tax exemption for bicycles and a fuel tax exemption for certain alternative fuels.

Each category has its own table of tax expenditure estimates. Within each table, the list of tax expenditures delivered through the income tax system has been separated into two sub-categories.

• Provincial Measures: This includes all major tax expenditures that are under provincial policy control.
• Federal Measures: British Columbia shares the cost of some federal income tax expenditure programs because, under the tax collection agreement between British Columbia and the federal government, the province has agreed to maintain a consistent income tax base with the federal government in the interest of reducing administrative and compliance costs.

The cost of individual tax expenditures cannot be added together to reach a total tax expenditure figure for two reasons:

• in some cases the programs interact with one another so that eliminating one program could increase or decrease the cost of another; and
• eliminating certain tax expenditure programs could change the choices taxpayers make, which in turn would affect the cost estimates.

The estimates for each tax expenditure are based on a static analysis of the costs and do not take into account any behavioural changes which could change the cost over time.