I expect that, if asked, most people would say that there is some aspect of their life that is being inconvenienced or worse by bureaucratic delay. Indeed, there may be several. What can you do about it? One option is to complain to the organization that is causing the delay if you can find some individual or office to address your concern. Another is to complain publicly, hoping that your complaint adds to a loud chorus that the organization cannot ignore. And a third is to suffer in silence.

In this post I discuss two bureaucratic delays that are top of mind for me, one with a large organization, the other with a much smaller one. And I speculate about the causes and remedies.

Death and Tax Rebates

The big organization is the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). Taxes are the price we pay for civilization, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, so the administration of taxation should be fair and efficient. The essential point of my experience is that the three executors of my late mother’s estate – of whom I am one – asked for a reassessment of her final income tax return that will provide a substantial rebate.

If you are interested in the details, read this paragraph. We sold my mother’s condo approximately a year after her death and the sale produced a capital loss relative to the value of the condo on the date of her death. This is not unusual. If real estate prices are stable (as was the case), then the price of the property in the estate sale would not be very different from the price assessed at the date of death, and the real estate agent’s and lawyer’s fees as well as any costs to prepare the property for sale would create a capital loss. The loss incurred by the estate can be carried back and will rebate some of the capital gains tax paid in the final return.

As an executor, I submitted the forms requesting the reassessment approximately a year ago. Eight months later I heard from CRA. Because there are three executors acting jointly, they demanded that the request for a reassessment come from all three executors. The three of us signed a cover letter and the reassessment form and sent them off to CRA a few days later. We expected that, as we had quickly corrected our mistake, CRA would deal with it quickly. No such luck. It appears that our second request went to the bottom of the pile and will be dealt with in due course. This is especially irritating because the rebate is the last thing we need to settle the estate.

What is happening at CRA? Budget cuts are affecting its service quality. Yesterday the Auditor General of Canada released a report showing that CRA call centres are performing poorly, with long delays to receive incorrect advice. I expect that this burden falls on lower income Canadians because wealthier people use accountants. In the case of our delay, the CRA may be putting a higher priority on the initial assessment of tax returns than on reassessments, especially if the reassessment is asking for a rebate.

Bringing our Book to Life

My second bureaucratic delay story concerns a program run by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences called the Scholarly Book Awards. On its website the program posts the slogan “Bringing the Book to Life,” which my experience suggests could be read ironically. The Federation is an organization of Canadian academics that, through the Scholarly Book Awards, is allocating money from the federal government to subsidize Canadian publishers of academic books. There is enough funding for the program to give up to 180 awards of $8000 each or a total of $1.4 million. This is small change for the Government of Canada, but it has a big impact on academic publishers. Award applications are evaluated by members of the Publications Committee, who are themselves academics.

The University of Toronto Press applied for an award to support publication of my co-authored book Public Representations. Publication of our book is not contingent on receiving the grant, but it would improve its marketing. Our application was submitted at the end of last March and, almost seven months later, we still haven’t heard from the program. We were told by the publisher that this is not atypical.

I looked up the report on the 2024-25 Scholarly Book Awards (that is for the fiscal year from April 1, 2024 to March 31, 2025). Several things caught my attention. A total of 215 applications were received and 123, or only 57 percent were processed. Of those that were processed, 90 percent were approved. Reviewers don’t need to read the entire manuscript: they receive a short application form, external reviews commissioned by the publisher, the author’s response to the reviews, the book’s front matter, and its first and last chapters.

The report said that “the program experienced some processing delays during the year due to staff turnover and reviewer fatigue [but] operational capacity has since increased. Changes to internal workflow as well as reviewer recruitment and expectations are expected to support the volume of new applications, while maintaining quality and rigour.” Not to worry then, the Publications Committee has the problem under control. However, the narrative and the numbers, in addition to our experience, don’t seem to align.

As a career academic, I have been involved in virtually every part of the publication process. Reviewing is done by academic volunteers, but there are ways to encourage people to do the collegial thing. One that comes to mind would be to make it clear in the Scholarly Book Awards application form that successful applicants will be expected to review a number of subsequent applications themselves. In any event, I don’t expect that an effective editor of an academic journal would ever, like the Scholarly Book Awards, have to admit that the flow of applications and decisions is not in balance.

To return to my title, I’ve broken my silence and aired my frustration with two bureaucracies that are taking their time with my applications. I’m not saying that I’m being singled out for special treatment, and I hope that writing this post will not lead me to be singled out for special treatment. I think both organizations could do better. CRA needs more money to operate effectively, and I hope the Carney Government’s November budget, despite its promised cuts in program spending, will make an exception for the CRA. The Scholarly Book Awards need a fine-tuning of the incentives for volunteerism.