Two Years of Under Review, Unstuck by a Complaint

The situation

'Why does the government get to hold my money for two years and not tell me why?' Adaeze asked, sitting across from us with a folder of CRA correspondence that said almost nothing at all. She ran a small mixed farm outside Oshawa - vegetables, eggs, a handful of laying hens - built up over four years, working security guard shifts at a warehouse three nights a week to cover the gap while the farm found its feet, while her husband Kwame kept steady income coming in as a factory technician on the overnight shift. The farm was young enough that every dollar mattered, and the HST refund she was owed, somewhere in the range of fifteen to fifty thousand dollars, was not a rounding error to them. It was the difference between expanding the following season and standing still.

The refund had been flagged for review not long after she filed, which was not unusual on its own - CRA reviews HST refund claims regularly, especially for newer registrants with large input tax credits relative to reported sales, and farms often fall into exactly that pattern because equipment and supply purchases are front-loaded while revenue builds slowly. What was unusual was what came next: nothing. No request for additional documents. No explanation of what specifically triggered the review. Just an account status that said 'under review' every time Adaeze called, month after month, for close to two years.

She had sent everything she could think of - invoices, bank statements, a letter from her accountant summarizing the farm's first three years of activity - without any of it visibly moving the file. Each call to the general enquiries line produced a different agent, a repeat of the same status, and a promise that someone would follow up that never seemed to happen. Kwame's shifts covered the household bills, but the farm itself needed the refund to buy stock and repair a section of fencing before the next season, and two years of 'under review' had stopped being patience and started being a real operational problem.

The moment it stopped being merely frustrating and became urgent was when a small adjoining parcel came up for sale - land Adaeze had been hoping to add to the farm for two seasons - with a closing date set for the week before a long weekend. The financing she had lined up assumed the refund would be in hand by then. It was not. That was when she called our office, less interested in the mechanics of the review than in one plain question: was there anyone above the phone queue who could actually explain what was going on.

The complication

An HST refund review normally runs weeks to a few months, not years - CRA asks for documents, the taxpayer supplies them, and the file closes one way or the other. Two years with no request outstanding and no explanation offered was well past anything that pattern could account for, and the general enquiries line, by design, is not equipped to say why: the agents answering those calls can see a status code on the account, but they cannot see the internal case notes explaining what actually happened to a file, or whether the substantive work on it had already finished.

That was the real complication. The review, it eventually turned out, had substantively concluded roughly a year in, but nobody had updated the account or flagged the file as ready for sign-off, so the status code sitting in front of every phone agent Adaeze reached kept reading 'under review' for over a year after the review was, in practical terms, already done. Nobody had been dishonest with her. The system she was calling into simply had no way of surfacing a problem that lived inside the file rather than on its surface.

Layered on top of that was the land purchase deadline, which created a second, harder problem: government review timelines do not move faster because a taxpayer has a closing date. There is no formal channel for asking CRA to prioritize a file because of an external deadline, and pushing too hard on urgency risks looking like pressure rather than a legitimate service concern. The complication was making the case that this was a genuine service failure - a file stuck well past any reasonable timeline - without leaning on the land deal as if that alone entitled Adaeze to faster treatment.

There was also no formal objection to file, because an objection challenges a specific assessment or decision, and here there was no decision at all - just silence. A review that never produces an assessment leaves nothing for the usual dispute process to attach to; there is no notice to appeal and no ninety-day clock running against which to measure anything. That gap pointed toward a different route entirely: a complaint to the Taxpayers' Ombudsperson, an office that investigates how CRA has handled a file rather than whether a tax result is correct, and that was the tool actually built for a problem like this one.

What we did

1. Built a complete timeline of every contact with CRA. We collected two years of call logs, reference numbers, and Adaeze's own notes into a single chronological record, since the ombudsperson's office evaluates service complaints on a documented pattern rather than a single missed call, and a scattered set of phone dates would not have shown the repeated dead ends clearly enough on its own. Laid out end to end, the record made the two-year gap impossible to mistake for ordinary processing time.
2. Requested a formal, written status update through the proper channel. Rather than another general enquiries call, we submitted a written request asking CRA to confirm what stage of review the file was actually at, what remained outstanding, and who held responsibility for it. That is a request the phone queue cannot answer, since agents there only see a status code, but it creates an actual record CRA has to respond to and a paper trail for escalating further.
3. Reached an assigned case officer, Cherise, and got a real answer. Escalating the written request past the general enquiries line eventually connected us with Cherise, an actual case officer with access to the internal notes, who confirmed what the phone queue never could: the substantive review had concluded roughly a year earlier, the input tax credits had been accepted as claimed, and the file was simply sitting in an internal sign-off queue that nobody had flagged as complete.
4. Filed a formal complaint with the Taxpayers' Ombudsperson. Because there was no assessment to dispute - only a service delay with no ongoing legal basis - the objection process did not apply. We filed a service complaint documenting the fourteen months of silence after the review had effectively finished, asking the ombudsperson's office to investigate the handling of the file.
5. Advised on a short-term bridge to protect the closing deadline. With the refund's timing still uncertain and the land purchase closing bearing down, we flagged the farm's deadline to the ombudsperson's office as context for how the delay was affecting Adaeze in real terms, and separately connected her with options for a short-term loan so the closing would not be lost to a CRA delay that was clearly not her fault.
6. Followed up until the file actually moved. Acceptance for investigation is not the same as resolution, so we stayed in contact with the ombudsperson's office through the following weeks, checking in roughly every ten days rather than waiting for CRA to reach out first, and confirmed the refund was finally released to Adaeze's account roughly six weeks after the complaint was formally filed and accepted.
7. Reviewed the interest calculation on the released refund. Once the refund arrived, we checked what CRA had paid in interest for the full review period against the prescribed statutory rate, and separately raised the fourteen months of pure administrative inactivity as grounds for something more. CRA declined, treating that stretch as an internal processing delay rather than a basis for additional compensation - a limit worth flagging honestly to Adaeze rather than glossing over.
8. Debriefed Adaeze on what to do differently on the next filing. We walked through which categories of input tax credits tend to draw review scrutiny for newer farm registrants - large equipment purchases and supply costs claimed well ahead of matching sales revenue chief among them - so future returns could be filed with invoices and a brief explanatory note attached up front, reducing the odds of triggering the same lengthy review on the farm's next HST filing.

The outcome

The refund arrived about six weeks after the ombudsperson's office accepted the complaint for investigation - not because the office ordered CRA to pay it, since it does not have that power, but because a formal service investigation tends to move files that have been sitting untouched for over a year. The amount released matched what Adaeze had originally claimed, in the range of fifteen to fifty thousand dollars, closing out the substantive review that had, it turned out, actually finished many months earlier.

The compromise was in the interest. CRA paid the standard statutory rate for the period the review was legitimately active, but declined to add anything extra for the fourteen months the file sat untouched after the review had concluded, treating that stretch as an administrative delay rather than something that triggers additional compensation. We pushed on this point and did not get further movement - a limit worth naming honestly, since not every service failure translates into a dollar figure at the end.

The land purchase closed on schedule, but not for free. Adaeze used the short-term bridge loan we had helped her arrange to cover the gap between the closing date and the refund actually landing, and that loan carried real interest for the roughly two months it was outstanding - a cost that came directly out of the delay, even after the refund itself was recovered.

What changed afterward was how she deals with CRA correspondence. Adaeze now keeps a running log of every call and reference number from the day a review opens, rather than letting two years of frustration force the habit, and she knows the general enquiries line is not where a stalled file gets unstuck once a review has clearly gone past the ordinary timeline. Adaeze's security shifts and Kwame's overnight factory work kept the household afloat through all of it, and the farm itself lost nothing beyond the fencing repair that waited an extra season - a real cost, but a contained one, against what a fully stalled purchase would have meant.

What you can learn from this