The OBA tax section sponsored a good session today on “Best Practices for Managing the Flow of Information to and from the Canada Revenue Agency”. A couple of interesting tidbits that came out: 1. Some folks at the CRA seem…
Family Law Again
The Ontario Court of Appeal has considered again whether property that was supposedly the subject of a gift should be excluded from a husband’s net family property for the purposes of the Family Law Act (Ontario): see Buttar v Buttar,…
Klundert loses again … and again
It appears Mr Klundert, about whom I wrote previously here, is not having any further luck in his court battles. The CRA reassessed him for unpaid taxes in respect of income he failed to declare and for which he was convicted on evasion charges. His appeal of the related civil reassessments to the Tax Court (Klundert v R, 2013 TCC 208) was dismissed recently because, among other things, the Court found the appeal to be an abuse of process.
Some tax issues for criminal lawyers
This article originally appeared in the Hamilton Law Association Journal.
A client facing criminal charges would seem to have enough on his or her plate—like the possibility of serving a jail sentence—without having to worry about tax issues. The CRA, however, will be only too happy to pile on where it thinks the accused has earned income that should be subject to tax.
Why the hiatus?
I haven’t posted to this blog since late June, which is probably the longest break I’ve taken from writing posts. The reason for not posting is a good one, however: effective August 1, I began practising law on my own…
Legal project management
Legal project management (LPM) is all the rage in certain quarters. It’s not a new idea, of course. I remember talking about it with some of the lawyers in the large firm I worked for in Toronto in the mid-90s. There wasn’t much appetite for LPM software at the time, I think in part because some of the tools available then appeared too inflexible for the typical M&A deal.
Rectification denied
From the “There But for the Grace of God Go I” file, see Kanji v AG Canada, 2013 ONSC 781. It’s striking that the trial judge was so troubled by the lack of supporting evidence from Mr Kanji’s professional advisers…
Tax in the news
Tax is really in the news this week. The Current was asking whether Canada needs to get tough on tax evasion. The CBC says that the CRA is getting tough on home offices (when did they ever go easy on…
A case for checklists
Paragraph 248(7)(a) of the Income Tax Act (Canada) deems a return or other document mailed by first class mail to be received by the addressee on the date it is mailed. What happens if you send a document to the CRA by mail and it says it didn’t get it? The answer seems to be that you or your accountant had better have a standard procedure for mailing documents about which you can give evidence to convince the CRA or a court on a balance of probabilities that the document was mailed even if the CRA did not get it.
More ‘Fun’ With Section 160
I’ve written a number of blog posts and articles on the “long arm” of section 160 of the Income Tax Act (Canada), and I’ve mentioned that liability under section 160 does not depend on whether the transferor or transferee know of a liability of the transferor in respect of which the section could apply.