Jamie Golombek: Greatest to file CRA appeals inside 90 days of the date in your discover of evaluation
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Congratulations! You’ve filed your 2023 tax return by the April 30 deadline and also you’re awaiting your formal discover of evaluation from the Canada Income Company.
As soon as obtained, take an in depth look to confirm that the CRA has assessed your tax return as you filed it. If not, you may have the formal proper to object and, in the end, to your day in courtroom. However with a view to shield your proper to object and maybe take your matter to the Tax Court docket of Canada, you’ll have to be sure you file a sound and well timed discover of objection by the deadline.
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There are a few methods to file an objection. The simplest is to file it on-line by logging onto the CRA’s My Account for People and choosing “File my formal dispute.” You’ll be assigned a case quantity that you just’ll want to incorporate when submitting paperwork, which will also be finished on-line.
Alternatively, you may file your objection by mail by printing, finishing and sending Kind T400A, Objection – Earnings Tax Act to the chief of appeals at your Appeals Consumption Centre. Should you don’t need to use the T400A, you may merely mail the CRA a signed letter that clearly outlines the info and causes to your objection.
The deadline for submitting an objection is one yr from the conventional submitting due date, or 90 days after the date printed in your discover of evaluation (NOA), whichever is later. Should you miss the deadline, you may apply to the CRA inside one yr of the deadline for an extension. If the CRA denies your utility, it’s possible you’ll attraction to the Tax Court docket.
Lately, the CRA has added a “Progress Tracker” to My Account, the place you may view the standing of information that you’ve submitted to the CRA, together with your objection. It’ll present the date your objection was obtained after which the date that an preliminary screening was accomplished.
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For instance, I filed an objection on Aug. 9, 2023, for a few of my disallowed 2021 home-office bills. It was screened on Sept. 7, 2023 — not unhealthy — and it was decided that my objection had “a medium stage of complexity.” It went on to say that the CRA’s objective “is to resolve medium-complexity objections inside 365 calendar days of the date they’re despatched to the CRA” — not nice.
Should you plan to file an objection, make sure you file your objection on time. Being even sooner or later late could be deadly. We have been reminded of this most lately in a tax case determined earlier this yr involving a personal Ontario company that was assessed GST/HST below the Excise Tax Act for 9 month-to-month reporting durations between December 2016 and Could 2019. The notices of evaluation have been despatched by the CRA on Nov. 27, 2019.
Underneath the act, the corporate may have filed a discover of objection with the CRA inside 90 days after the day discover of the evaluation was despatched, but it surely failed to take action. As an alternative, it waited till Feb. 26, 2021, earlier than making use of to the CRA for an extension of time to file an objection. The CRA refused to grant the appliance on the premise that it was filed sooner or later past the one-year limitation interval, which is one yr following the 90-day deadline. The taxpayer then utilized to the Tax Court docket to have its extension utility granted.
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The taxpayer’s place was that the deadline for submitting its discover of objection would have been Feb. 26, 2020, and that it had filed its deadline extension utility on time, on Feb. 26, 2021, which was inside one yr of the Feb. 26, 2020, deadline. In accordance with the taxpayer, it interpreted the 90-day interval to file its discover of objection as having begun on Nov. 28, 2019, that being the day after the date on which the discover of evaluation was despatched.
However the CRA disagreed, asserting that the company’s discover of objection had really been due by Feb. 25, 2020, which was the ninetieth day after the date printed on the NOA (Nov. 27, 2019), with the ensuing extension utility due to this fact due by Feb. 25, 2021. Because of this, the company’s extension utility was sooner or later late, so the CRA was prohibited from granting the extension utility.
The decide reviewed either side’s place and concluded the company had, sadly, miscalculated its deadlines. If Nov. 28, 2019, was the primary day of the 90-day interval inside which the company was to file its objection, then the ninetieth day afterward, being the deadline by which the objection needed to be filed, would have been Feb. 25, 2020, with the extension deadline one yr later, being Feb. 25, 2021.
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The decide, due to this fact, had no selection however to dismiss the taxpayer’s utility, so the company was unable to problem the 9 GST/HST assessments because the deadline for objection, in addition to the extension, had handed.
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“The very best time to file a discover of objection is inside the 90-day interval set out in (the act.) Submitting a discover of objection even sooner or later exterior that 90-day interval carries important danger, as a result of the objection is now contingent on the (CRA) granting an extension utility,” John Bassindale and Stuart Clark, tax attorneys with Millar Kreklewetz LLP, stated in a current written commentary on the choice.
They famous that “ready till the deadline date to file is a observe that ought to typically be averted, given the various potential failure factors (starting from the technological to the non-public) that would intervene with the method.”
For tax professionals, they advisable sustaining knowledgeable “doomsday system” for diarizing and monitoring related deadlines to make sure deadlines will not be inadvertently missed. That is sound recommendation for all of us.
Jamie Golombek, FCPA, FCA, CFP, CLU, TEP, is the managing director, Tax & Property Planning with CIBC Non-public Wealth in Toronto. Jamie.Golombek@cibc.com.
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