About Auditor’s Qualifications
Titles of auditors and appeals officers are more about marketing than they are about substance.
Your auditor may not even be a qualified accountant. Although they usually are.
Getting the title “Officer” sounds official, however it is just a word and you can not assume that the CRA clerk is knowledgeable or experienced.
As a general rule, you can assume you are dealing with an accountant who may or may not know anything about business.
A government accountant called an auditor does the best they can to get their job done and collect as much from you as possible.
If you decide to object, most objections are assigned to an appeals officer who is at the same job classification level as the assessor or auditor who issued the assessment in the first place.
Classification levels generally reflect the competencies and experience required for a position, with higher levels requiring more competencies and experience.
The highest classification for auditors is AU6, whereas AU3 is the highest for appeals officers in the field (at headquarters it is AU4). Therefore, an appeals officer can be asked to resolve an objection to an assessment prepared by an auditor at a higher classification level.
The more junior appeals officer could allow the objection and reject the auditor’s assessment. This happens in practice, and it does not seem logical or appropriate, particularly in complicated cases where the issues are often highly technical and call for the judgment and experience needed to allow taxpayers and registrants to exercise their rights while protecting the public purse.
Currently CRA is working on a competency strategy. It is our experience that you can not really expect a huge competency in CRA until you get to staff with years of experience or when you get to the Department of Justice.