Take Tax Advice From CRA With a Grain of Salt

According to a recent CBC article¹, an internal Canada Revenue Agency survey found that 1 out of 4 callers to CRA’s business tax line are given incorrect information. The survey “confirms repeated complaints by a small-business group that the call centres are routinely dispensing misleading — and perhaps legally dubious — answers,” meaning that businesses who unknowingly received bad advice could potentially face an audit for attempting to comply with CRA rules.

The article noted that as a result of the findings CRA plans to institute a “calibration framework to ensure … consistency.” In the meantime, corporate taxpayers may find it a good idea to use the approach some accounting firms were said to take – that is, to ask the same question of different agents and follow the most common response.

1. Dean Beeby, CBC News. “Revenue Canada’s call centres giving bad tax advice: report.” Accessed February 16, 2015. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/revenue-canada-s-call-centres-giving-bad-tax-advice-report-1.2946998.