Tax Tip Thursday

Where are your tax slips?

With just under a week to go before the tax-filing deadline, we are still having problems with clients’ online accounts at the CRA still are not showing a variety of tax slips, including, for many, the crucial T4s that record employment income.

We have been having so many problems with people’s slips missing. Luckily most people have their slips, but it means we have to input many of them manually, which of course takes much longer. Normally, we are able to download the slips from the CRA and cross reference them to any paper slips we have from the clients.

The issue is linked to a CRA systems update that has resulted in some tax-slip providers, such as employers and financial institutions, running into challenges when uploading taxpayers’ data to the government’s secure portal.

That was another problem that also has been costing us time. Uploading our corporations’ Tslips to the CRA. Something that normally takes us about 10 minutes has often taken us close to an hour and even then required multiple tries at it!

The agency has been aware of the problem for some time and initially waived late-filing penalties until March 7 for all slips that would normally be due at the end of February. But the problem has not been resolved yet. The CRA said they should be available mid April. Nope.

“The CRA is actively working to address any outstanding issues, including consulting with issuers, to ensure tax slips are made available on the portal,” CRA spokesperson Sylvie Branch said, adding: “We regret any inconvenience this may cause.”

The CRA has basically said to bad so sad – good luck!

The technological hiccup doesn’t mean that taxpayers lack the information they need to do their taxes, as issuers make copies of the tax slips available directly to employees or clients. But the high incidence of missing slips in the CRA portal has made it impossible for many people to rely on the agency’s auto-fill feature to automatically populate their returns.

And the other problem of course is that many people do not have all their slips, they do not know if they all their slips and worse yet, many people would not know if they had all their slips or not!!!!!!

The CRA has put all of us in a terrible position and it is the tax payers that will pay the price on this one along with all the tax preparers.

Another source of confusion: The tax agency clarified in February that its automatic e-mails confirming receipt of tax-slip data didn’t actually mean the submission had been accepted by the system!!!!! Some firms that had assumed they had successfully filed the data found out that was the note case.

CRA has left us high and dry, so please bear with us.

We have done our best to prioritize clients that we think might owe taxes or will be affected by a late filing.

Sole proprietorships have moved down the list, but it could cost a little interest due to tax owing. We are working on estimating.

Have you been affected by missing tax slips?  Make An Appointment today!

Disclaimer:

This article provides information of a general nature only. It is only current at the posting date. It is not updated and it may no longer be current. It does not provide legal or tax advice nor can it or should it be relied upon. All tax situations are specific to each individual. If you have specific tax questions you should book an appointment for a 1 on 1 consultation.