Ordinarily, when confronted with an allegation that a notice of reassessment was not mailed on the date printed on the notice, the CRA will respond with affidavit evidence from a CRA officer. The affidavit will state that the CRA invariably follows certain procedures when mailing notices that are designed to guarantee they were mailed on the stipulated date and that nothing in the CRA’s files suggests that the procedures weren’t followed in the case of the notice in question. In Sicoli v R, 2013 TCC 207, that strategy failed to convince the Tax Court judge because there was evidence—in the form of numerous errors on the faces of the notices in question, among other things—that the usual procedures weren’t followed.
