Waiting for six months in some sort of a queue for a re-assessment to be completed for last year's income tax by CRA. Verified it with the St Johns Office in December and they said it might be a couple of weeks before the letter of re-reassessment was produced and the charge cancelled. He said everything was fine and the letter would soon come. They were all working then. Still nothing; a computer would have had it done in a few minutes.
The only way to get some sleep at night is probably to just pay them and wait for CRA to eventually get around to doing the re-reassessment of last years taxes (all of the documents have been online now since December 2022). Then they can return the money; it does seem like a make work project though and nearly $20.000 is a lot of money for sure.
A company was hired to do the income tax but they did not put the requested documents in the re-assessment up online as requested by CRA. Fortunately CRA did send an email saying that the company had not done so and the documents were uploaded to the website personally in December on receipt of their email. I welcomed the comment that CRA was thinking of doing the income tax for Canadians; life would be so much easier with a totally computerized system that we just upload all the documents at income tax time along with our calculations and not wait for re-assessment (although lately the reassessment asks for more and more documents not available at tax time and we do have a tax treaty with the United States). The tax submission is the same exact tax return style that has been done for her for sixteen years - my daughter just thought she would get a company to do it instead of me since I am 77 now.
I must say it looked so straight forward in December after talking to the person in St Johns but one needs to renew the hold on interest charged every three months (so it takes a phone call) although he did say it should be done long before then. But now it is mucking up this year's tax return which I submitted and I do find that hard to understand since everything is in her file. I just assumed that when they received the couriered package (one cannot upload extra items currently online when submitting taxes) they would notice that the re-reassessment had not been completed and do it (they did notice the tax charge and it is marked as onhold). I do understand of course that CRA is on strike and has a minimal work staff. Computerization sounds lovely; I have been working with computers since 1966 and they can be programmed to literally handle anything. I do hope that she gets her money back in time to buy her RSPs this year. Imagine being charged $20,000 in taxes by Canada having already paid over $30,000 to the IRS on the same money. We do have a tax agreement (there are Americans working here at our universities). The good part at the time, since she did not get any of the jobs she applied for here, was a great research group there.
Tea prepared and on to the day. I do not like to judge but nearly six months does seem like rather a long time to handle a simple tax return re-reassessment. It was checked on again in January and we were told it is in a queue and wait your turn. How come there is so much in the queue? Shouldn't there be a queue for simple cases and a queue for complex ones? Computers can do anything including making appropriate queues. With a hold on the tax money interest in her account I find it hard to believe that a person doing her income tax didn't take a second to check on the reason. Why does it take so long to do such a repetitive task - she has sixteen years of income tax returns exactly the same? Obviously computerization of such returns is a necessity as she is not the only Canadian working in the United States. Does CRA not realize that $20,000 is a lot of money to have to pay out when they are just going to return it (what if someone has to get a loan just to pay that?). It is her RSP money and will they get it done in time for this year or will that muck up next year's taxes for her as well?
Sent this to the Member of Parliament this morning. I sent it to the Prime Minister as well. And the Minister of Finance.
Computers are a great gift and should be used to the maximum of their ability (we have excellent computer systems in the government I am sure). People still need to be an interface but efficiency should be the most important item. People's ability to manage their livelihood is dependent on that efficiency. But of course there will always need to be clerks for various tasks.
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