Effective. Accessible. Responsive
This article originally appeared in the Hamilton Law Association Journal.
A client facing criminal charges would seem to have enough on his or her plate—like the possibility of serving a jail sentence—without having to worry about tax issues. The CRA, however, will be only too happy to pile on where it thinks the accused has earned income that should be subject to tax.
Legal project management (LPM) is all the rage in certain quarters. It’s not a new idea, of course. I remember talking about it with some of the lawyers in the large firm I worked for in Toronto in the mid-90s. There wasn’t much appetite for LPM software at the time, I think in part because some of the tools available then appeared too inflexible for the typical M&A deal.
Paragraph 248(7)(a) of the Income Tax Act (Canada) deems a return or other document mailed by first class mail to be received by the addressee on the date it is mailed. What happens if you send a document to the CRA by mail and it says it didn’t get it? The answer seems to be that you or your accountant had better have a standard procedure for mailing documents about which you can give evidence to convince the CRA or a court on a balance of probabilities that the document was mailed even if the CRA did not get it.
I’ve written a number of blog posts and articles on the “long arm” of section 160 of the Income Tax Act (Canada), and I’ve mentioned that liability under section 160 does not depend on whether the transferor or transferee know of a liability of the transferor in respect of which the section could apply.
Mark Hunter pointed out to me that paragraph 20(1)(j) of the Income Tax Act (Canada) doesn’t work well as an income-averaging tool if used in circumstances where the person taking the loan can’t repay it any time soon or will do so in a year without much income.