MISUSE OF DRIVER INC. NEEDS TO END

The Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) has taken a stance and is urging individuals in the trucking industry to do the same – it’s time to put an end to the misuse of Driver Inc. As a leading transportation and logistics company we take pride in our unwavering commitment to safety, integrity and respect for the governing bodies. We are passionate and active community members, doing our best to abide by our legal obligations and to give back to our surrounding communities. This is true not only for us as a corporation, but for numerous hardworking tax-paying Canadians.

Driver Inc. is a model that drivers who do not own or lease their own vehicles adopt to become incorporated and work for carriers as independent contractors. This means that drivers take home larger paychecks because they do not pay the same taxes as all other Canadian employees. Along with paying less tax, they do not pay deductions such as EI, CPP or benefits. Many of these drivers are being misclassified and they do not meet the criteria set out by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to be considered a Personal Services Business (PBS).

Along with drivers personally committing tax fraud, corporations who hire these drivers are committing the same fraud. Many of these carriers even go as far as requesting their drivers to become incorporated, or only hire incorporated drivers, so that they can reduce their tax obligation and operation costs. For example, if a company has 100 employed drivers, they may legally be claiming to have 50 employees because the other 50 are being classified as incorporated. This is a huge mistreatment of the laws and policies that we are all responsible for keeping. This provides these dishonest carriers the unfair advantage of reducing their operating costs, allowing them the ability to offer customers lower rates other law-abiding carriers cannot compete with. This is hurting the industry tremendously.

Here at Erb, “We take pride in doing things the right way. Driver Inc. is not the right way to recruit and ‘employ’ drivers. All we are asking the CRA to do is level the playing field for all Canadian carriers,” says President and CEO Wendell Erb.

There are numerous negative implications the misuse Driver Inc. classification causes. Our tax dollars build the streets we all drive on, the schools we send our children to and hospitals that care for our loved ones. It is a complete abuse of our system to allow Driver Inc. to continue. It is necessary that we stop this tax scheme so that we can continue working towards making our homeland sustainable for all its inhabitants. We are joining the CTA’s campaign to ask the Federal Government to act on this injustice immediately and better protect lawful carriers and drivers whose livelihood is being threatened by this tax scheme. Please share this post and help end the misuse of Driver Inc.