Guest blog from Mark Goodfield, CPA CA LPA Cunningham LLP
Believe it or not you can be charged a 20% penalty for missing information that the CRA already has on hand.
In the next month or two, the CRA’s matching program will begin kicking out notices of reassessment to Canadians whose reported income on their 2012 income tax returns does not match the CRA’s records. Some of these income tax filers will be assessed penalties of 20% on income not reported. Yes, that is income not reported, not tax underpaid! This penalty applies to income tax information your employer or financial institution provided to the CRA which was not reported on your return. In most cases, the omission of income was purely unintentional.
How can one be considered to not have reported income that the CRA has in its database? Is this not a penalty for failing to confirm income, as opposed to not reporting income? This is how the matching program works.
The Matching Program
The CRA’s matching program catches the non-reporting of income every fall. Each year the CRA checks the T-slip information in its database against Canadian taxpayer’s income tax returns to ensure the T-slip income reported matches. Where the income filed by a taxpayer does not match the CRA’s database records, an income tax reassessment is mailed to the taxpayer asking for the income tax due. If the taxpayer is a first time offender, they are just assessed the actual income tax owing and possibly some interest. If this is the second occurrence in the last four years, a 20% penalty of the unreported income is assessed.
The Penalty Provision
Under Subsection 163(1) of the Income Tax Act, where a taxpayer has failed to report income twice within a four-year period, he/she will be subject to a penalty. The penalty is calculated as 10% of the amount you failed to report the second time. A corresponding provincial penalty is also applied, so the total penalty is 20% of the unreported income.
Ouch! Is this Fair?
I find this penalty unfair for the following reasons:
1. It is excessive. I can accept a penalty of 5%, maybe 10%, but 20%?
2. The penalty can be levied even if you owe no income tax. I.e.: If someone in Ontario fails to report a T4 slip with $5,000 of employment income and the slip also reported $2,325 of income tax deducted, they would owe no income tax, as the maximum marginal income tax rate of 46.41% was applied (ignoring Ontario supertax). However, if you had failed to report income in any of the three prior years, the penalty under subsection 163(1) would be $1,000 (20% x $5,000), even though you owed no income tax and the CRA was provided this information by your employer.
3. The penalty can vary wildly on the exact same total of non-reported income. If you fail to report $2,000 two years ago and fail to report $100 this year, your penalty is $20. However, if you failed to report $100 two years ago and failed to report $2,000 this year, the penalty is $400! That is a huge difference in penalties for the exact same total of unreported income.
4. Most penalties relate to T-slips taxpayers did not knowingly ignore or evade. In most cases, the missing income relates to T-slips lost in the mail or sent to the wrong address. Also, many T-slips are now issued online and are easy to miss.
According to an article by Tom McFeat of CBC News, the number of Canadians penalized for this repeated failure to report income totaled over 81,000 in 2011 with an income tax cost of slightly over $78,000,000.
To be clear, my issue with this penalty is that taxpayers in most cases are being penalized where there is no intent to hide income and the CRA receives that information. However, I am not as forgiving with the non-reporting of rental income, capital gains or self-employment which relies on taxpayer honesty.
Tax Tip for T-slips Received after You Filed Your Return
If you receive (or discover) a T-slip after filing your tax return and ignored the slip since it was a small amount, dig it out tonight and file a T1 adjustment as soon as possible before the matching program gets you. Even a small $10 missed slip will start your clock ticking for a potentially larger penalty if you miss reporting income again in the subsequent three years.
Mark Goodfield is a chartered accountant with Cunningham LLP and author of The Blunt Bean Counter blog.
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