Relying on CRA's Auto-fill can be costly as tax case over missing income shows
No one wants to be late filing their tax return, but filing early can also be a problem, especially if you’re unsure whether you’ve received all your tax slips.
Tax season officially opens on Feb. 19, which is the earliest day you can file your 2023 tax return online. The risk of filing early, especially in February or early March, is that you may not have received all your tax slips yet, since the deadline for them to be sent out varies from the end of February (for T4s and T5s, among other slips) to April 2 (for some T3s, and T5013s). This can be a particular problem if you solely rely on the Canada Revenue Agency’s Auto-fill my return service.
Auto-fill, first introduced in 2016, allows individuals and authorized tax preparers to automatically fill in parts of their personal tax return with information the CRA has available at the time of the request, such as T-slips, registered retirement savings plan contributions and much more. To use the service, you must be registered for the CRA’s My Account program, and be using Netfile-certified software that offers the Auto-fill feature.
The CRA receives tax information from third parties, and will ultimately receive most (but not all) tax information slips and other tax-related information for the 2023 tax year by early April, if not sooner. Common tax information slips available online include T3, T4, T4A, T4A(OAS), T4A(P), T4E, T4RIF, T4RSP, T5, T5008 and RC62.
But even if you wait a bit longer to file, and you rely on Auto-fill to capture the income from all your tax slips, it’s still best to check your account statements to make sure no income is missing. A tax case decided in January dealt with just such a situation.
The case involved a Quebec taxpayer who filed his
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