While the standard (and accurate) advice is that tax and financial planning are best approached as activities to be carried on throughout the year, it’s also the case that a mid-year tax and financial checkup makes good sense, and that’s especially the case this year.
Newsletter Archives - Page 25 of 29 - Akler Browning LLP
Although the filing deadline for individual income tax returns for the 2019 tax year has been extended to June 1, 2020, millions of Canadians have nonetheless already filed those returns. Specifically, by May 19, 2020, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) had processed just over 20 million individual income tax returns filed for the 2019 tax year.
Although we’re not even halfway through the calendar, 2020 has already been a year of significant financial upheaval and stress for millions of Canadians. The number of employed Canadians fell by one million during the month of March 2020 — and then by another two million during the month of April.
Since mid-March, the federal and provincial governments have announced the creation of numerous programs to help both individuals and Canadian businesses with the financial fallout of the current pandemic. Of those programs, none has had a more direct impact on the lives of Canadians than the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, or CERB.
Working from home isn’t really a new phenomenon — employees have been doing so for more than 25 years, ever since changes in technology made such remote work arrangements feasible. Over the past two months or so, however, millions of Canadian employees have had to adapt to working from home for the first time.
The Old Age Security program is the only aspect of Canada’s retirement income system which does not require a direct contribution from recipients of program benefits. Rather, the OAS program is funded through general tax revenues, and eligibility to receive OAS is based solely on Canadian residency.
By the time most Canadians sit down to organize their various tax slips and receipts and undertake to complete their tax return for 2019, the most significant opportunities to minimize the tax bill for the year are no longer available. Most such tax planning or saving strategies, in order to be effective for 2019, must have been implemented by the end of that calendar year.
The past few months have been an almost perfect storm of bad financial news for Canadian retirees. The historic stock market downturn which occurred in mid-March resulted in a significant loss of value for many retirement savings portfolios, whether those savings were held in registered retirement savings plans (RRSPs) or registered retirement income funds (RRIFs).
There have been so many announcements over the past couple of months with respect to temporary changes to individual and business tax obligations that keeping up with all of the new rules and altered deadlines isn’t easy. The good news is that, in all cases, individual taxpayers (both employees and the self-employed) are being provided with extended time to pay any income tax amounts for both 2019 and 2020.
The Canada Revenue Agency regularly carries out review activities in which taxpayers are asked to provide documentation or other information with respect to their entitlement to claimed benefits or credits.