Bringing about a higher level of transparency and accountability in provincial and federal governments to help protect taxpayers from abuse
Residents of some of the North Shore’s most exclusive neighbourhoods may have some ’splaining to the taxman to do if their reported income does not appear to support their affluent lifestyles.
The Canada Revenue Agency’s Postal Code Project is targeting five wealthy neighbourhoods across the country – including one in the Lower Mainland – to start taking a closer look at residents’ tax filings.
Read more at North Shore News
Twenty-four-year old Marica Peel says she’s spent the last six months trying to prove to the Canada Revenue Agency that she has been separated from her former partner, and the father of her son, for the past three and a half years.
But she said despite doing everything the agency has asked of her, she’s been told she still owes $4,500 — and her child benefit payments have stopped.
Read more at CBC News
OTTAWA – Canada’s tax collectors often aren’t picking up the phone, and when they do, Canadians are being given incorrect information, a new federal audit reveals.
The examination by Canada’s Auditor General Michael Ferguson into whether the Canada Revenue Agency’s nine call centres were providing Canadian taxpayers with timely access to accurate information, found that call centre agents only answered the phone about one-third of the time.
When the callers do get through to the call centre, the audit found that agents are giving Canadians incorrect information nearly 30 per cent of the time.
Read more at CTV News
OTTAWA – The Canada Revenue Agency says it won’t hesitate to investigate new evidence of offshore tax evasion in the wake of a second massive leak of tax haven financial records.
The leak of some 13.4 million records, dubbed the Paradise Papers, lifts another veil on the often murky ways in which the wealthy – including more than 3,000 Canadian individuals and entities – stash their money in offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes.
Read more at Maclean’s Magazine
Much has been written regarding the proposals released by the Department of Finance on July 18, 2017 to limit income splitting and holding passive investments inside a private corporation.[1] A third measure, namely, placing limits on the conversion of income to capital gains is aimed at preventing an individual selling shares of a corporation to a non-arm’s length person followed by a sale by the non-arm’s length person to a connected corporation. The foregoing transaction would result in the individual realizing a capital gain based on the fair market value of the transferred share followed by the tax-free extraction of corporate surplus of the transferred corporation. This is considered an inappropriate conversion of what would otherwise be a payment of dividend income into a capital gain. The difference in tax rates is about 14%.
Read more at Taxed International
Chander Mohan Sharma has been found guilty of one count of defrauding the Canada Revenue Agency for an amount of more than $5000.
According to the “Toronto Sun”, this is for approximately $ 2.9 million in false claims that the individual has been found liable.
During the trial of Sharma, it has been said that the irregularities were as a result of depriving the government of Canada of approximately $600,000.
Read more at Sherbrooke Times
The Canada Revenue Agency says eight of its employees were fired in the last fiscal year after violating taxpayers’ privacy.
Previously, the agency has not always confirmed if an employee was fired or shuffled out of the CRA for being part of a privacy breach, often citing the employee’s privacy.
A spokesman for the agency says the employees in each case were found to have had unauthorized access to taxpayer information, including one incident that the CRA calls the largest such breach in the agency’s history.
Read more at theglobeandmail.com
Canadians are receiving fewer scam phone calls from fake Canada Revenue Agency agents demanding money, but must still be wary of fraudsters despite the lull, the RCMP said in a statement on Friday.
The drop in calls is likely the result of arrests in Thane, India, on Oct. 5. Authorities in India arrested about 70 people from a call centre and questioned hundreds of other call-centre employees.
People in Canada and the U.S. have been plagued by aggressive callers claiming to be tax agency officials. Reading from a script, they accuse their victims of owing large amounts in back taxes and threaten to have them arrested.
Initial reports said the arrests in India were linked to U.S. Internal Revenue Service scams, but the RCMP has since discovered they were also involved with calls into Canada.
Complaints about Canada Revenue Agency scam calls “significantly decreased to a small fraction of what was reported for the weeks and months leading up to these arrests,” the RCMP said.
“Though the reports have diminished, it does not necessarily mean that this scam has stopped.”
The scam callers have also pretended to be immigration agents and police officers.