A mid-year tax check-up on your taxes (June 2021)
By the beginning of June, most Canadians have filed their individual income tax return for the 2020 tax year and received a Notice of Assessment (NOA) outlining their tax position for that year. Those...
How to not fall victim to a tax scam (May 2021)
It is a sad fact that, every year, thousands of Canadians become the victims of scams in which fraud artists claim to be representatives of the federal government. Equally sadly, in most cases the mon...
Paying the taxman – when and how (April 2021)
Our tax system is, for the most part, a mystery to individual Canadians. The rules surrounding income tax are complicated and it can seem that for every rule there is an equal number of exceptions or ...
What’s new on the 2020 tax return? (March 2021)
While the obligation to file a tax return recurs annually, that return form is never exactly the same from year to year. Tax brackets and allowable deduction and credit amounts change each year and, m...
Claiming the Canada Child Benefit (August 2019)
Raising children is expensive and, in recognition of that fact, the federal government has, for more than half a century, provided financial assistance to parents to help with those costs. That assist...
More debt … and more interest (February 2019)
The fact that debt levels of Canadian households have been increasing over the past decade and a half can’t really be called news anymore. In particular, the ratio of debt-to-household-income, which...
The tax scam that won’t go away (October 2018)
Tax scams have been around, probably, for about as long as Canada has had a tax system. They also have a tendency to proliferate at certain times of the year — often during tax return filing and ass...
Deciphering your Notice of Assessment (June 2018)
By the middle of May 2018, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) had processed just over 26 million individual income tax returns filed for the 2017 tax year. Just over 14 million of those returns resulted ...
