A Shoebox of Missing Receipts and a Move to Ottawa

The situation

What worried Iryna most was not the number on the reassessment — it was the thought of having to pay it back out of a pension that had no room in it for surprises. After thirty years as a baker, she had wound down to part-time work and then, at 61, took on a new position managing the kitchen for a small catering company, a job that only existed in Ottawa, more than the distance the rules require before a move counts as work-related. She sold her long-time home, bought a smaller one closer to the new job, and claimed the costs of the move: legal fees, the moving company, and several weeks of temporary accommodation and restaurant meals after the sale of her old home closed before the new one was ready for her to move into.

CRA's reviewer, Ranjit, had flagged the claim for a closer look, in particular the temporary living costs, which totalled close to $6,000 layered on top of roughly $14,000 in more conventional moving expenses. Combined, the two categories put about $20,000 of deductions from that year's return under review. If CRA disallowed the temporary living portion, or worse, the whole claim on the basis that the paperwork behind it did not hold up, Iryna would owe back the tax she had already saved through the deduction, with interest accruing from the original filing date, on income she no longer earned at the rate she had earned it when she filed.

She came to us with a specific fear rather than a vague one: not that the law was against her, but that she could not actually prove what she had spent. She had kept the big receipts — the moving company's invoice, the lawyers' statements of adjustments from both closings — but the smaller ones, the hotel stays and the restaurant meals from the fifteen days she had claimed within the six-week gap between closings, had mostly gone into a shoebox that had not survived a move meant to simplify her life, not complicate it further. Her daughter Lesia, a veterinary technician who had helped her through the move, remembered roughly how long the gap between closings had lasted, but memory is not documentation, and CRA does not accept an honest recollection in place of a receipt. Iryna's fear was not abstract: on a fixed pension with no salary behind it anymore, a demand to repay tax already spent on ordinary living costs would have meant borrowing against a retirement she had only just settled into.

The risk we had to size

Moving expenses that qualify for the deduction cover a defined list: the obvious costs like a moving company and legal fees on both the sale and purchase, but also, within limits, the cost of temporary living near either the old or new residence when a gap opens up between selling one home and being able to occupy the other. That temporary living component is capped at fifteen days of meals and lodging — a hard statutory limit that applies no matter how long the actual gap runs, so a six-week wait for possession still only ever supports fifteen days of claimed cost, not the whole gap. Iryna's return had already respected that cap, claiming costs for fifteen of the six weeks she was actually out of a permanent home; the dispute in front of us was about proving what she had spent during those fifteen days, not about extending the claim beyond them. Within that window, the ordinary limits still applied: the accommodation and meals had to be reasonable in amount and, critically, supported by records showing what was actually spent and when.

The risk we had to size was not whether temporary living costs could qualify in principle — they clearly could, on the facts Iryna described — but whether the missing receipts would sink a claim that was otherwise legitimate. CRA does not require every claim to fail just because documentation is incomplete, but it is entitled to disallow any amount it is not satisfied was actually incurred, and a reviewer facing a shoebox that did not survive the move has a reasonable basis to be skeptical of round, recollected numbers.

We also had to size a second, quieter risk: that a reviewer who found the temporary living claim under-documented might extend that skepticism to the rest of the return, including the larger and better-documented legal and moving-company costs that were not actually in question. An under-supported piece of a claim can sometimes drag a solid piece down with it if the file, taken as a whole, reads as loosely kept.

The honest assessment we gave Iryna early was that some of the $6,000 in temporary living costs was very likely to survive review if we could reconstruct even approximate but credible support for it, and that the risk sat almost entirely in that category rather than in the $14,000 of legal and moving costs, which were fully documented from the start. The real question was how much of the temporary living number we could rebuild credibly enough for a reviewer to accept, and how much would have to be conceded.

What we did

1. Pulled bank and credit card statements. We started by pulling Iryna's credit card and bank statements for the six-week gap between closings, since a statement showing a hotel charge or a restaurant charge is real evidence of what was spent and when, even without a receipt. This took several requests to her bank for statements older than she could access online herself, but it produced a dated, itemized record more reliable than memory, one we could use to isolate the fifteen days she had actually claimed.
2. Anchored the timeline to the closings. We then cross-referenced every dated charge against the two lawyers' statements of adjustments, which recorded the exact closing date on the old home and the exact possession date on the new one. That let us confirm, to the day, which fifteen days of the gap matched the window Iryna had claimed, since CRA's reviewer would only accept costs tied to that specific window, not any accommodation appearing on the statements outside it.
3. Went straight to the hotel for a duplicate folio. For the hotel stay specifically, we contacted the hotel directly and requested a duplicate folio showing the dates and nightly rate, since a hotel's own records are stronger evidence than a credit card line item alone. The hotel was able to produce it from its own system within a couple of weeks, which turned the largest single component of the temporary living claim from an estimate into a properly documented expense.
4. Built a conservative, corroborated meal estimate. For meals, where receipts were thinnest, we built a conservative daily estimate based on the actual restaurant charges that did appear on the statements, averaged across the fifteen days actually claimed rather than claimed at the highest individual amounts, and got a short written account from Lesia describing the general pattern of eating out during the weeks she helped her mother through the move. A conservative, corroborated estimate holds up better on review than a larger number with no support behind it at all.
5. Assembled a reconciled submission. We put all of it together into a written submission for CRA: a table reconciling every claimed dollar to a specific statement entry or document, a copy of the hotel folio, the lawyers' statements of adjustments establishing the gap, and a short explanation of the estimation method used for meals, so the reviewer could see exactly how each figure had been reconstructed rather than simply asserted.
6. Walked the reviewer through it line by line. We then went through the submission with Ranjit directly, walking through the reconciliation line by line and addressing his specific concern about the round numbers in the original claim. Having the hotel folio and dated statement entries in hand changed the conversation considerably; the discussion moved from whether the claim was credible at all to which of the smaller, less-supported meal estimates he was prepared to accept in full.
7. Set Iryna up for next time. Finally, we advised Iryna to keep a simple folder, physical or digital, for any future move or major deduction, with receipts scanned as they come in rather than stored loosely, and to keep bank and credit card statements downloaded rather than relying on her bank's online portal, which she learned during this process does not keep records indefinitely.

The outcome

CRA accepted the fully documented items without further question: the moving company's invoice, both lawyers' fees, and the hotel stay once the duplicate folio was in hand, together worth close to $17,500 of the original $20,000 claimed. The meal estimate fared less well. Ranjit accepted the conservative, statement-supported average for thirteen of the fifteen days Iryna had claimed, but declined the two days where the credit card statements showed no restaurant charges at all, on the reasonable basis that Iryna could not have incurred a meal expense with no record of it existing, however she and Lesia recalled that period.

The net result trimmed roughly $400 off the temporary living claim, a small fraction of the $20,000 under review, and left the rest of the deduction standing. Iryna did not get the full amount she had originally claimed, and she had to accept that a genuine but undocumented cost is not the same thing as a cost CRA will allow, no matter how honestly it was incurred. But the outcome was a long way from the full reassessment she had originally feared, and it left the much larger legal and moving-company deductions untouched by the reviewer's skepticism about the smaller, harder-to-prove piece.

Iryna kept the folder system we recommended and used it again the following year when she claimed a smaller set of work-related expenses from her new position, this time with every receipt scanned the week it was incurred rather than reconstructed a year later from bank statements and a daughter's memory of a stressful few weeks. She has told Lesia that the hardest part of the whole review was not the argument with CRA, but the hours spent on hold with her bank requesting statements old enough to matter. She now keeps a running note on her phone of anything she pays for that might matter at tax time, updated the day it happens rather than left to memory months later.

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