Bringing about a higher level of transparency and accountability in provincial and federal governments to help protect taxpayers from abuse
“Providing benefits not burdens” is how former Health Minister, Judy LaMarsh once described the vision for disability policy in Canada.
Unfortunately, this vision is not a reality when it comes to one of the main benefits open to Canadians with disability: the federal Disability Tax Credit (DTC.) Administered by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), the DTC is designed to recognize some of the higher costs faced by people with severe disabilities and their caregivers.
Read more at Huffington Post
About 240,000 low-income Canadians eligible for millions of dollars in federal support payments aren’t getting the cash, partly because the Canada Revenue Agency paperwork is too complicated.
That’s the tentative conclusion of a Finance Canada review of a vaunted poverty-reduction measure, the Working Income Tax Benefit (WITB), a program that is a decade old this year.
Read more at CBC News
The Federal Court of Canada has ordered U.S.-based PayPal to hand over details about its business account customers to Canadian tax authorities.
The court order, obtained by the Canada Revenue Agency, forces the U.S.-based payment processing firm to release information about Canadians with PayPal business accounts who processed transactions between the start of 2014 and last Friday.
Read more at CBC News
OTTAWA — About one-fifth of a group of wealthy Canadians who took part in a federal government survey last year didn’t believe that a proposed advertising campaign about a federal crackdown on tax cheats would do anything to deter people from using overseas tax havens.
There was a similar response from “high net worth” respondents who took part in the survey, conducted last December but released only recently. About one quarter of respondents didn’t believe that the Canada Revenue Agency ads would deter people from taking part in the underground economy.
Read more at CTV News
The Canadian government is revamping its advance income tax rulings process and restricting access to its voluntary disclosures program to better address tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance, the country’s national revenue minister said.
Improvements to the Canada Revenue Agency’s audit process for multinational and large businesses, together with funding commitments of more than C$1 billion ($740 million) to fight tax evasion, are expected to help recover more than C$13 billion in taxes owing in the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2017, National Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier said June 1.
Read more at bna.com
An agreement that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of Canadian banking records being sent to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service could violate the U.S. constitution, a congressional subcommittee heard Wednesday.
Testifying before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Senator Rand Paul said the intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) negotiated by the U.S. with various countries after it adopted the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) did not get the proper authorization.
The controversial legislation, adopted by the U.S. in 2010, requires financial institutions outside the U.S. to report to the Internal Revenue Service on bank and financial accounts held by those subject to U.S. tax law.
While it was designed to ferret out offshore tax cheats, thousands of Canadian residents who have dual citizenship or various connections to the U.S. have also been subject to FATCA.
read more at cbc.ca
The Canada Revenue Agency says it has recovered more than $240 million from audits related to probes of tax cheating on real estate in British Columbia and Ontario.
According to figures published on the CRA’s website, the bulk of the money comes from probes in Ontario, where the federal department has recovered $210.4 million through more the 13,400 audits conducted between April 2015 and September 2016
More than 10,900 of those Ontario audits are related to the GST/HST New Housing and New Residential Rental Property rebates, and resulted in $143.9 million in recoveries.
Meanwhile, the CRA says it has recovered $30.3 million from 2,366 audits in British Columbia, with more than half of that money related to GST/HST fraud probes.
CRA has also imposed $12.5 million in penalties. In the event a taxpayer knowingly makes a false statement when filing a return, the CRA can apply a penalty equal to 50 per cent of the additional tax payable. Between April 2015 to September 2016, the CRA applied 663 penalties, with the biggest one hitting almost $2.5 million.
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/cra-audits-real-estate-1.3813584
Life is getting harder for Canadian multinationals trying to reduce taxes by transferring profits abroad.
In its latest budget, the federal government committed to increasing enforcement efforts against companies that improperly shift profits to lower-tax countries by abusing a legal practice known as transfer pricing—but the Canada Revenue Agency has already been cracking down on the abuse for years.