Changes to Paper Filing Disempowering

Last tax season, only 7% of all Canadian tax filers filed on paper. The CRA is pushing for zero. It continues to steer the holdouts to digitized filing by adding lots of obstacles. Most recently, it is removing almost all the schedules from the tax return package it mails. This seems unfair to people who paper file because they can’t afford a computer and internet, distrust the security of online filing and those who are neither tax or computer literate. Here’s what they are up against:

Parents with children under age 18 living at home will be receiving a lump sum of $420 per child with their July Child Tax Benefit payment. This lump sum represents the additional $60 per month per child payable as of January 2015.

CRA has applied a net-worth assessment against your client, who now comes to you for help . . . and they are emotional and scared. What do you do first?

The most recent economic data is indeed atrocious, as Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz predicted in England late last year.

Last week’s KBR reported on a recent Statistics Canada study, Changes in Debt and Assets of Canadian Families, 1999 to 2012, that confirmed a trend that Canadians are carrying more debt than ever before.

There are three certainties in life – death, taxes and change.  So, dealing with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) can prove a stressful interaction for both taxpayers and their advisors.  

David Christianson, one of Canada’s Top 50 Wealth Advisors and this month’s featured guest speaker at DAW, says tax or financial advisors have the obligation to make critical conversations about what really matters our clients in the future, happen.