CRA battle shows what's involved when you take on the taxman

financialpost.com:

This lyric comes to mind each time I get another piece of correspondence from the Canada Revenue Agency. My friends and family often joke that since I write a nationally syndicated tax column, where I occasionally highlight the trials and tribulations of ordinary taxpayers as they battle with the taxman, it makes me a target, which is why I seem to get audited by the CRA on a regular basis.

Frequent readers may recall my fight with the CRA over my transit passes and, more recently, the reassessment of my 2020 work-from-home expenses. My latest dispute with the CRA, also involving home-office expenses, but for the 2021 tax year, came to a mostly favourable conclusion when I agreed to a settlement offer proposed by the CRA, and received my formal notice of reassessment last week.

I’m sharing the details of my latest battle with the tax agency to show you what’s involved if you decide to take on the CRA — and that’s without even going to court.

Prior to March 13, 2020, I had never worked from home; I went to my office in a downtown Toronto office tower five days per week unless I was travelling. That all changed, of course, when COVID-19 hit and we were forced to work full time from home from March 2020 until the summer of 2022, when we had a partial return to the office, which exists to this day.

On my 2020 tax return, for the first time in my career, I deducted some home-office expenses using the detailed method. Under this method, which I continued to use in 2021, I added up my home expenses, including electricity, gas and internet, and then deducted a small portion of them — 6.52 per cent, to be exact — representing the approximate square footage of a spare bedroom, which I use exclusively for work when working from