LINK: A lot of restaurants using electronic “zappers” to hide their sales from the CRA

Some access-to-information judo by the Canadian Press has uncovered a Canada Revenue Agency investigation into some fishy accounting practices that are apparently pretty widespread in the restaurant industry. The agency looked into 424 restaurants across the country with electronic cash registers for record keeping and found that about a third of them used USB-key “zappers,” or secret features baked into their software to make some of their sales data—and their taxable revenue—disappear. Already, two cases have been prosecuted, resulting in fines and even jail time, and the story quotes a spokesperson as saying the CRA “has every intention of proceeding” on more cases. Yikes. We’re not sure how common this is in Toronto, but the CRA report notes that as the practice spreads, “more and more businesses may feel they need to compete by suppressing sales.” Read the whole story »