Unit B
Activity 3

T.I.P.S.

To the Teacher:

This activity engages the students with the T.I.P.S. service of the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, first over the telephone and then on-line. You might choose to do one or both.

The Tax Information Phone Service (T.I.P.S) provided by CCRA gives information on a wide variety of tax related topics. However, many of the messages are very long and contain a great deal of information. Before assigning a message number to students and asking them to report on the information they receive, you should listen to the message for yourself in order to judge whether students would be able to extract the information they need.

Three fairly straightforward messages are contained in 147 (non-taxable income), 400 (GST/HST credit), and 500 (Canada Child Tax Benefit - CCTB). These are the ones we have used in the exercises that follow.

In addition, for those who have access to the Internet, we have provided a similar activity for students to find information on the CCRA web site.

We suggest that you check this activity out for yourself before assigning it to students. Web sites do change from time to time, and it can be very frustrating for students to find the instructions don't go with what is on the screen.

Although we have provided a copy of the T.I.P.S. page of the Guide, it doesn't photocopy very well. We have provided it only so that you or your students can see which page it is. If students are going to work with this page, they should use the actual one in the Guide.