The Canada Revenue Agency will also automatically test eligibility to the CWB when taxes are filed in order to increase accessibility to the program.
[5] To be eligible for the CWB, the applicant or their spouse must be a Canadian resident for income tax purposes of at least 19 years of age as of December 31, and cannot be a full-time student.
However, the additional paperwork required to claim the credit is complex, involving a 42-step process on Schedule 6 of Canada's main income-tax form.
[12] Consistently since 2009, only about 85% of all working Canadians eligible for the WITB have claimed their benefit, with particularly low uptake in Atlantic Canada and the Prairie provinces.
[12] This is thought by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to be due to a mixture of lack of awareness and the complexity of the forms required to claim the benefit.