If you receive a tax bill that you disagree with there maybe ways for the tax to be reduced. The CRA will present you with a bill in line with the Income Tax Act and will do all they can to collect the money they believe you owe. A lot of the time when there is an objection made, the reason for the disagreement is the interpretation of how the law should work, and success or failure with a CRA tax appeal will depend on whose interpretation is considered to be correct.
If you think you have a case but are not sure what to do next, then you can seek the advice of a tax experts and they will be able to go through the reasons why you may have a good case to put in a CRA tax appeal. If they don’t believe that you have a good case, then they should tell you this, and like it or not you will have to accept the tax bill is correct. Rather than a CRA tax appeal, they can still help you come to an arrangement to pay.
If a general meeting or conversation does not iron out the problems, then there is the need to escalate the issue and put in a Notice Of Objection which is important when making a CRA tax appeal. You need to make sure that you are within the deadline for doing this as each stage you follow will have a timetable and they will not all be the same. The person helping you with your case will be able to keep you up to date and will be able to reassure you that the time you are waiting is not that unusual and is not necessarily a bad omen.
A CRA tax appeal is not a short process, so there is no point trying to hurry things along. It could be six months before the appeal is heard and in some cases as long as 12 months. The person dealing with the CRA tax appeal will be new to your case so will not have any pre conceptions when going over the paper work. Throughout the appeal you will receive relevant documents and you can also ask for the whole file if you feel this will help you.
It will be in your interest to have someone helping you through this process, and as it is likely to be a long term procedure, you need to have someone who knows the tax law and is used to working within this environment. If you put in a CRA tax appeal, there are good sides and bad sides. The good is that there is no need to pay the amount owed until the appeal is decided, so you can have some breathing time. The bad side is that there is interest added. In reality it will be best to pay the balance especially if you are not 100% sure that your CRA tax appeal is going to go your way.