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Introduction
It seems that more often than not, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is a creditor in the personal or corporate insolvency matters that I get involved with. Many times the person, be they just an individual, an unincorporated business owner or the President of the company, will ask, “will CRA contact me if I do not pay?”.
In this Brandon’s Blog, I discuss the various ways CRA will contact the responsible individual, be they the taxpayer or the authorized representative of the taxpayer company.
Types of CRA debt
The following types of tax debt are the usual ones that a person in Ontario might owe:
- personal income tax
- unremitted source deductions or HST of an unincorporated business
- Director liability for corporate unremitted source deductions or HST
The following types of tax debt are the usual ones that an Ontario corporation might owe:
- corporate income tax
- unremitted source deductions or HST
Most likely CRA has already contacted the insolvent person or company before they come to see me for a free consultation. The reality is that when someone owes money to Revenue Canada and gets one of those unique brown envelopes in the mail, they tend to feel sick in the stomach. So, although they may keep the envelope and its contents, they certainly don’t wish to look inside it.
Let’s look at the various ways CRA has to contact a taxpayer and for CRA payment arrangements to be made.
Ways you and the taxman can communicate
Notice of Assessment or Reassessment
The first way CRA will contact you is by sending a notice of assessment or reassessment to the individual or corporate taxpayer. This is a notice that explains the reason for the (re)assessment, the calculation and the amount owing. There is no need to talk about the situation where the taxpayer pays the balance in full on time. I am talking about the situation when the taxpayer cannot afford to pay the amount owing.
Be proactive
If you cannot pay the total you owe, be proactive by getting in touch with the CRA as soon as possible. Overlooking your debt does not make it vanish. As a matter of fact, ignoring it might make things worse. This is the same whether it is a personal debt or a corporate debt.
The CRA tacks on interest at the prescribed rate compounded daily. You can’t avoid this because whether you realize it or not, CRA has become your lender for any unpaid amounts. By taking action first, you can at least ward off a much worse result. So you contacting CRA is the first and best way to make the connection.
I will discuss below what your options are concerning amounts you cannot pay off immediately, but first, I want to discuss other ways that the CRA will contact you if you first don’t contact them.
Telephone or letter
If the taxpayer does not contact CRA to work out a payment arrangement (discussed below), CRA will then communicate with the taxpayer. The amount owing is assigned to a collections officer who will contact the taxpayer by telephone, letter or both.
If the taxpayer responds to that outreach, the collections officer will attempt to obtain payment. The collections officer will also ask many more questions. If the taxpayer is a company, the collections officer may also make an appointment to go visit the company to review its financial records.
The purpose of asking the questions and reviewing corporate financial records is to attempt to determine if any money is owed to the taxpayer by third parties and where does the taxpayer maintain bank accounts.
Garnishment by a Requirement To Pay
Armed with the information obtained from the taxpayer’s tax filings and any additional information collected through discussions or reviews, the next level of CRA contact to get the taxpayer’s attention is not with the taxpayer, but rather with third parties. A Requirement To Pay (RTP) is a lawful notification that the CRA sends out to a 3rd party when:
- the CRA thinks that the 3rd party owes or will owe money in the future to the taxpayer that has not paid their tax obligation; and
- the CRA has not been able to collect the taxpayer’s debt or make an appropriate settlement plan with the taxpayer.
The RTP advises the 3rd party to send the money the third party owes to the taxpayer to the CRA, rather than the taxpayer. The RTP reveals the taxpayer’s name, address, and the CRA account number.
The RTP is the way the CRA uses to garnishee bank accounts, wages or any other amount owing by a third party to the taxpayer. An RTP can garnishee all sorts of repayments a 3rd party might make to a taxpayer. The more common ones are:
- income, earnings, payments, bonus offers, or various other amounts owing by an employer to an employee;
- repayment of expenses owed to an employee;
- amounts due to a professional or contractor for work performed, products, or services;
- lease or rent payments;
- loan payments;
- interest or dividend payments;
- insurance claim settlements
- amounts on deposit at a financial institution
Seizing your assets
A garnishee through an RTP is to intercept and seize payments from a third party to the taxpayer. But what if there is no such third party that exists or can be found but the taxpayer has assets?
In that situation, the CRA has the power to seize assets found registered in the name of the taxpayer. This is how CRA goes about doing it. The CRA can lawfully register your debt with the Federal Court of Canada. By doing so they get a certificate validating the amount you owe to the Crown. As soon as it is issued, this certification, called a memorial, has the same or even greater impact as a judgment if someone sued you.
Now that the CRA has the memorial, they can register it against any assets in your name. This includes your home and its possessions owned by the taxpayer. The CRA rarely actually takes physical possession of the assets, but in most cases, they don’t need to. It will be impossible to sell or refinance your assets with the CRA memorial registered against it under provincial law. So when that time comes, the taxpayer will have no choice but to deal with the CRA on the outstanding debt, one way or the other.
Here are different ways that you can deal with the CRA on your tax debt if you cannot pay it now in full.
Payment arrangement
This is the first and most hassle-free way of paying off your tax debt. A payment arrangement is a settlement plan you make with the CRA. It enables you to make smaller regular payments over time until you have paid your whole tax debt plus interest.
Prior to agreeing to the settlement plan, the CRA collections officer will want to know that you are paying the maximum amount you can afford. Hopefully, the amount you can pay is at least the same as the minimum monthly amount the collections officer is willing to accept.
So, the collections officer will ask you all sorts of questions and may even want you to complete a questionnaire, so that they understand your monthly budget as part of any debt settlement plan.
As part of making a payment arrangement, you should also be working with your accountant to see if any of the taxpayer relief provisions are available to you. This blog isn’t meant to be a discussion of the income tax act or taxpayer relief, so, I won’t go into any more detail than that.
Any payment arrangement has to deal with 100% of the principal amount of tax owing plus interest. Unfortunately, the collections officer does not have the authority to make a deal to accept less than full payment, absent an insolvency proceeding (further discussed below).
Insolvency proceeding
If you cannot reach a satisfactory payment arrangement with the CRA, or you have one but can no longer keep up with the payments, then, the taxpayer can consider an insolvency filing. In the case of an individual, it would be either bankruptcy or a consumer proposal. For a corporation, it would be either a Division I Proposal or bankruptcy.
Either bankruptcy or a proposal will stop CRA’s ability to issue a requirement to pay or obtain a memorial. However, if CRA has obtained and registered a memorial before the taxpayer files for either a restructuring proposal or bankruptcy, the memorial cannot be eliminated.
Similarly, for a corporation, unremitted source deductions form a deemed trust claim against the company’s assets. So in either a bankruptcy or financial restructuring proposal, this trust claim cannot be eliminated or reduced. However, for both individuals and companies, the income tax debt can be eliminated. For companies, the HST arrears will not be a trust claim in bankruptcy. Unlike a bankruptcy, HST arrears are not automatically made unsecured by the wording of the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (Canada). However, current CRA policy in financial restructuring proposals results in the HST arrears being treated as an unsecured claim.
Personal or corporate income tax is an unsecured debt. As soon as you’ve declared bankruptcy or filed the financial restructuring proposal, the CRA cannot begin or continue any action against you, including wage garnishment or freezing your assets, including your bank account. Your licensed insolvency trustee (formerly called a bankruptcy trustee) will alert CRA as soon as you submit your filing and advise it to quit any type of enforcement activity through any RTP. As I stated above, unfortunately, any memorial already registered will remain against your assets.
Do you have too much debt?
I hope you have found this CRA contact Brandon’s Blog to have useful information for you. Do you have too much debt? Are you in financial distress? Do you not have adequate funds to pay your financial obligations as they come due?
If so, call the Ira Smith Team today. We have decades and generations of experience assisting people looking for financial restructuring, a debt settlement plan and to AVOID bankruptcy.
As a licensed insolvency trustee (formerly called a bankruptcy trustee), we are the only professionals accredited, acknowledged and supervised by the federal government to provide insolvency advice and to implement approaches to help you remain out of personal bankruptcy while eliminating your debts. A consumer proposal is a government approved debt settlement plan to do that. We will help you decide on what is best for you between a consumer proposal vs bankruptcy.
Call the Ira Smith Team today so you can eliminate the stress, anxiety, and pain from your life that your financial problems have caused. With the one-of-a-kind roadmap, we develop just for you, we will immediately return you right into a healthy and balanced problem-free life.
You can have a no-cost analysis so we can help you fix your troubles. Call the Ira Smith Team today. This will allow you to go back to a new healthy and balanced life, Starting Over Starting Now.
