The CRA has a history of asking me for documentation of my tax returns. I have managed to appease the Tax Mavens for now and have passed yet another Tax Return Review. Back in 2013 I received another CRA review letter.
For those who have not had the CRA tap them on the shoulder and ask, “Excuse me, but we’d like to actually see the receipts for all those expenses you have claimed”, which is what a CRA review letter is, it is not an audit, but with the proliferation of E-file’ing the CRA does like to double-check to make sure we are claiming all the credits that we can (OK, that is me being overly optimistic, it might be that they want to check our facts as well).
The trigger this time was a very large medical expense claim. As well, having three children at University at the same time sent up a red flag. I was asked to supply receipts for these claims.
The Medical Expense claim was high because:
- Thanks to our friend at the Blunt Bean Counter I had made a claim about education expenses for my son being a medical expense, which had already been OK’ed last year after I submitted a review request. This is an important expense for Parents with disabled children who are at specialized schools (I don’t seem to have written anything about this one, so my apologies, I will be writing one very soon about that). This is a straight forward claim, however, I will elaborate on it very soon.
- My son works with an Occupational Therapist (that my medical insurance refuses to cover) which I also claim
As for the University side of things I needed to supply the T2202A Â forms for all three of my kids (signed by each of them) with the tuition amounts on them as well.
From this incident, I realized that I could log onto the CRA account using my On Line Banking User ID . With my bank card and password I was able to send copies of all my documentation on-line. This meant I need no mail the originals to the CRA. Â I must tip my hat to the CRA for adding this feature. Who says no good ideas come out of the government?
Interesting to know you can now e-file receipts. I wonder if after they test it for a while they will insist we efile all receipts with our returns? I guess they might not want to cope with the bandwidth requirements to do that, though.