Re-published from the Globe & Mail Apr 6, 2025
CRA DELAYS IN POSTING TAX SLIPS
With less than a month to go before the tax-filing deadline, scores of Canadians say their online accounts with the Canada Revenue Agency still aren’t showing a variety of tax slips, including, for many, the crucial T4s that record employment income.
The issue is linked to a CRA systems update that has resulted in some tax-slip providers, such as employers and financial institutions, running into challenges when uploading taxpayers’ data to the government’s secure portal. The agency has been aware of the problem for some time and initially waived late-filing penalties until March 7 for all slips that would normally be due at the end of February. Yet, nearly a month and a half into the tax-filing season, many slips are still missing from Canadians’ online CRA accounts.
The problem doesn’t mean that taxpayers lack the information they need to do their taxes, as issuers make copies of the tax slips available directly to employees or clients. But the high incidence of missing slips in the CRA portal has made it impossible for many people to rely on the agency’s auto-fill feature to automatically populate their returns.
Accountants say filling out the forms manually comes with a heightened risk of errors and is resulting in added work during a tax season already mired by delays and uncertainty due to a host of last-minute tax changes implemented by Ottawa.
“It does put strain in the system,” said Ryan Minor, director of tax at Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada.
The CRA’s update, which the agency introduced in January, set up a new, stricter way of vetting tax slips, agency spokesperson Etienne Biram told The Globe and Mail via e-mail in March. The goal was to catch errors early on, before taxpayers would file based on incorrect information, he said.
But the changes have resulted in a slew of headaches for tax-slip providers, Mr. Minor said based on feedback from CPA firms, which handle the submission of slips for some business clients.
Many reported not knowing how to fill certain new mandatory information fields or interpret cryptic error messages from the CRA’s software that didn’t specify what had gone wrong, he said.
Another source of confusion: The tax agency clarified in February that its automatic e-mails confirming receipt of tax-slip data didn’t actually mean the submission had been accepted by the system, according to Mr. Minor. Some firms that had assumed they’d successfully filed the data found out that wasn’t the case, he added.
CRA likely didn’t do enough when it comes to educational outreach on the new vetting protocols, said Steven Watson, executive director of the EFILE Association of Canada, which represents tax preparers on issues involving electronic filing.
Mr. Minor said he’s seen instances of missing T4s even for public-sector workers, which suggests that the problem hasn’t spared large, sophisticated employers.
On Thursday, CRA acknowledged ongoing issues in a message sent to tax preparers who use the government’s electronic filing system. But the agency added that it believes most taxpayers have already received all the information needed to complete their returns.
“If you do not see a client’s tax slip in Represent a Client or when using Auto-fill my return, we recommend using the slips provided by their issuer (e.g., their financial institution or employer),” the agency said, referring to the online portal used by tax preparers to access information from their clients’ CRA accounts.
Daniel Varanelli, a CPA in Acton, Ont., said the tax agency doesn’t seem to grasp the magnitude of the consequences for tax preparers.
“How indifferent to suggest ‘oh well’ just start typing in all of the missing slips,” he said via e-mail.
For about the past 10 years, he said, the ability to import the majority of tax slips from clients’ CRA accounts, which Mr. Varanelli always checks against the copies provided by his clients, helped avoid input errors that could result in having to correct a return or a reassessment by the tax agency. It has also been a major time saver.
“Prior to the ability to import tax slips into my tax software, I would have had a co-op student working in my office inputting the tax slip information and I would have to review their work prior to finalizing the return,” he said.
CRA did not respond by deadline to a Globe request for more details on why the tax-slip issues persist and what it is doing to address the problem.
