By the time the CRA proposes a reassessment, the auditor has already formed a theory. Everything you hand over before that point either supports it or undermines it. The two things that decide the outcome are what you produce and what you say about it — and only one of those is protected by privilege.
Our charges include applicable taxes. Disbursements are extra and billed at cost — itemized upfront, in writing, never hidden.
From $563.87 taxes included
The Income Tax Act gives the CRA broad inspection powers. An auditor may examine your books and records, enter a business premises, and require you and your employees to give reasonable assistance and answer questions. Separately, the CRA can serve a formal requirement compelling you or a third party — your bank, your suppliers, your customers — to provide information or documents by a stated date.
If a requirement is ignored, the CRA can seek a compliance order from the Federal Court, and non-compliance with a court order carries contempt consequences. Parliament has also legislated in this area recently, including proposals to add a notice of non-compliance carrying a daily penalty; the state of that legislation should be confirmed before anyone relies on it.
What auditors cannot do is compel material protected by solicitor-client privilege. That distinction is why some audits are run through a lawyer: accounting work product is producible on demand, and there is no accountant-client privilege in Canadian tax law.
The normal reassessment period is three years from the date of the original notice of assessment for individuals, graduated rate estates and Canadian-controlled private corporations, and four years for most other corporations. Once it closes, the year is statute-barred and the CRA cannot reassess it.
There are exits. The CRA can reassess beyond the normal period where a misrepresentation was attributable to neglect, carelessness or wilful default, or where there was fraud — and the burden of establishing that sits with the CRA. It can also reassess at any time if you signed a waiver. Auditors routinely ask for waivers when a year is about to close, and the request is often framed as a formality. It is not. Signing hands away a defence you may want.
Where records are missing or the CRA does not accept them, it may build an indirect assessment — a net worth analysis inferring income from changes in your assets, or a bank deposit analysis treating unexplained deposits as income. These assessments are frequently wrong at the margins and are challenged by explaining specific deposits, not by attacking the method in the abstract.
Communications between you and your lawyer for the purpose of giving or receiving legal advice are privileged and cannot be compelled by the CRA. Communications with your accountant are not. If your accountant's file contains a memo weighing whether a position would survive audit, the CRA can generally get it.
When a lawyer is retained and the accountant works under that retainer for the purpose of the legal advice, the analysis is different — but the structure has to be set up properly at the start, not reconstructed once the auditor asks. Retroactive privilege claims fail.
Practically, the lawyer's other job is to control the channel. All contact goes through one place, answers are given in writing after consideration, and nobody in the business gives an unprepared explanation to an auditor standing in the warehouse. Most damaging admissions in an audit are casual, verbal and volunteered.
Before reassessing, the auditor usually sends a proposal letter setting out the adjustments and giving you a period — commonly thirty days — to respond. This is the cheapest point in the entire process to change the outcome. Once the reassessment issues, you are into objections and appeals, with their own deadlines, their own cost, and interest running throughout.
A good response does three things: it corrects factual errors with primary documents, it addresses the legal characterisation directly, and it deals separately with any proposed penalties. Penalties are often conceded when challenged on their own, because the CRA must prove the facts supporting gross negligence even where the underlying reassessment stands.
Our tax consult is $563.87, taxes included, and includes a written memo on your exposure and the position we would take. Audit defence is scoped and quoted separately once we have seen the auditor's correspondence.
For individuals, graduated rate estates and Canadian-controlled private corporations, the normal reassessment period is three years from the date on the original notice of assessment. For most other corporations it is four. After that the year is statute-barred. But the CRA can go further back where it can establish a misrepresentation attributable to neglect, carelessness or wilful default, or fraud — and there is no time limit at all for years covered by a waiver you signed.
Not without advice. A waiver keeps a taxation year open past the normal reassessment period, which is entirely to the CRA's advantage — refusing means the auditor must assess on what they have before the year closes, and the burden of justifying a late reassessment falls on them. Sometimes signing is genuinely sensible, for instance where you need more time to produce records that will help you. But it is a strategic decision with a real cost, not the routine paperwork it is usually presented as.
No. Canada recognises solicitor-client privilege but there is no accountant-client privilege. Your accountant's working papers, internal memos and emails about your tax positions are generally producible to the CRA on request or under a formal requirement. Legal advice from a lawyer is protected. Where sensitive analysis is needed during an audit, it should be directed by counsel from the outset — privilege cannot be applied retroactively to work that was already done.
An indirect method the CRA uses when it does not accept your records. It measures the change in your assets and liabilities over a period, adds estimated personal spending, and treats the unexplained increase as income. It is blunt and it overstates income routinely — by missing gifts, inheritances, loan proceeds, non-taxable receipts and transfers between accounts. You beat it by documenting specific items, deposit by deposit, rather than by arguing that the method is unfair in principle.
Nothing hasty. Note the response date, do not send documents you have not reviewed, and do not let anyone in the business have an informal conversation with the auditor. Get the scope in writing: which years, which issues, which entities. Then assemble the records yourself before producing them so you know what the auditor will see. Audits expand when the auditor finds something unexpected in a pile nobody looked at first.
Open your file tonight — a licensed Ontario lawyer will confirm everything with you by tomorrow.