On Friday, the BC Auditor General released an update on six different investigations his office is undertaking. The first was of the most interest to us at the CTF—the Organizational Costing of Fee-Based Goods and Services.

Essentially, the BC Government collects about $4 billion a year in fees, roughly 11% of their annual budget. These are fees for things like replacement birth certificates, drivers’ licences, and about 2,300 other charges.

There are two kinds of user fees:

1. Revenue fees: fees set high enough to generate a profit for government.
2. Recovery fees: fees set to recover full or partial cost of government delivering that service.

As an organization, we support recovery-style fees—we do not believe government should gouge taxpayers by trying to turn a profit on fees. Further, we don’t support certain taxpayers taking advantage of others by having them subsidize their need for specific, specialized items—thus fairly-set recovery-style fees are the way to go.

The Auditor General found that only 28% of these fees had last been reviewed in the 2000s. Another 27% were reviewed in the 1990s, and 1% in the 1980s. The other 44% had no date attached to them on when they were last reviewed by government.

That’s too long—government needs to review these fees and make sure they are charging an amount that is fair and covers off the cost of the work involved. Further, they need to review whether these services are even relevant any more—can we put them online? Can they be eliminated all together?

We don’t want to increase costs for any taxpayer, but at the same time, if people don’t pay their own way for these specialized services, the difference in cost will be passed on to all of us.