Affordable Business Expense Audit Support for Canadian Businesses

CRA online filing for 2025 returns opened 23 February 2026 and closes 29 January 2027. Most people file between late February and the 30 April 2026 deadline, and that stretch is what tax season refers to. You can gather documents and prepare a return earlier, but it cannot be sent electronically before the system opens. Employment and investment slips such as T4 and T5 are issued by payers early in the year, and the CRA's Auto-fill service can pull the ones it already holds once you have set up My Account.

Current and prior-year forms and publications are free to download from canada.ca, and tax software builds most of them for you as you enter your information. You can also order a paper package by phone or pick one up at participating postal and service outlets during filing season. Which forms apply depends on your situation: a T1 with your slips for employment income, T2125 for self-employment, a T2 for a corporation, T1-ADJ to change a return already filed.

Canada has no single tax compliance certificate, so the right route depends on why you need one. An executor or trustee asks the CRA for a clearance certificate before distributing an estate. A non-resident selling Canadian property applies for a certificate of compliance. For tendering or lending, you usually authorise the CRA to confirm your account standing instead. Each route requires every return filed and every balance settled first, and clearance requests commonly take months.

HST stands for harmonized sales tax: the federal 5% GST blended with a participating province's sales tax into one rate the CRA administers. For 2026 that is 13% in Ontario, 14% in Nova Scotia since 1 April 2025, and 15% in New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Prince Edward Island. Provinces that did not harmonise keep a separate provincial tax on top of the 5% GST, and Alberta, Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut charge 5% only.

For your own tax information, ask for a personal information request through the federal ATIP online portal, or submit the government's request form to the CRA's access to information office. Name the years and the type of record - notices of assessment, audit working papers, collections notes - because a narrow request is answered faster. Check CRA My Account first: slips, notices and account balances are already there at no cost.

The individual and business enquiry numbers, along with their hours, are listed on the CRA contact page. Have your social insurance number or business number and a figure from a recent return ready, because the agent must verify you before discussing anything. Many tasks never need a call: CRA My Account and My Business Account show balances, assessments, slips and instalments, and let you file a dispute, change a return or set up a payment arrangement.

For a personal return the late-filing penalty is 5% of the balance owing plus 1% for each full month the return is late, to twelve months. It rises to 10% plus 2% a month, to twenty months, only where the CRA served a demand to file and a late-filing penalty was charged in one of the three preceding years. Interest also runs on the unpaid balance. A corporate T2 follows the same structure.

Income tax on a business is charged on net profit, meaning revenue less reasonable business expenses, not on gross sales. A sole proprietor reports that on the T2125 and a corporation on its T2. Other taxes do not work that way: GST/HST applies to your taxable sales whatever the profit, and payroll remittances follow wages paid. A business loss can usually be applied against other income or carried forward to a later year.

You remain responsible for what your return says, even when someone else prepared it, so the CRA assesses the tax, interest and penalties against you. A preparer who makes or participates in a false statement can face third-party penalties of their own, and may be liable to you for negligence, which is why engagement terms and professional insurance matter. Keep your source documents for six years from the end of the tax year they relate to.

Taxable profit is accounting profit adjusted to the rules in the tax law. Start from net income in the financial statements, add back amounts that are not deductible, such as accounting depreciation, reserves and the non-deductible portion of meals and entertainment, then deduct tax-specific claims such as capital cost allowance and losses carried forward. The result is the figure the rates apply to: for 2026, 9% federally on the first $500,000 of active business income for a small corporation.

A reimbursement of actual travel costs you paid, supported by receipts, is not income. A flat travel allowance is generally taxable unless it is a reasonable per-kilometre allowance for business driving; for 2026 the CRA's reasonable rate is 73 cents per kilometre for the first 5,000 kilometres and 67 cents after that, four cents more in the territories. Allowances above a reasonable amount, or paid without a distance record, are added to your T4 income.

Payments from a registered source, such as an annuity bought with RRSP or pension money, are fully taxable as income in the year received. A non-registered annuity is taxed only on its interest element, because the rest of each payment returns your own capital: a prescribed annuity spreads that interest evenly across the payments, while a non-prescribed one reports more of it in the early years. Slips report the taxable portion annually.