The CRA has discretion to cancel penalties and interest. It has none over the tax itself. A relief request is not an argument that the assessment is wrong — it is an argument that the extra charges piled on top of it should not stand.
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Extraordinary circumstances: serious illness, an accident, a death in the family, a fire, a flood, a postal disruption. Something outside your control that stopped you filing or paying on time, evidenced with dates that line up with the periods you missed.
CRA actions: processing delays, incorrect written information from the agency, errors in its published material, or a file that sat in appeals for years while interest ran. Where the CRA's own delay grew the interest, this is the strongest ground available.
Inability to pay or financial hardship: where paying the interest would prevent you meeting basic living expenses, or where accumulating interest is the only thing stopping an otherwise viable business from clearing the debt. This ground requires full financial disclosure and is decided on the numbers, not the narrative.
Relief can also cover late, amended or revoked elections, and refunds or reassessments beyond the normal reassessment period for individuals and graduated rate estates.
Subsection 220(3.1) of the Income Tax Act — and section 281.1 of the Excise Tax Act for GST/HST — allow the Minister to waive or cancel penalties and interest for the ten calendar years before the year the request is made. A request filed in 2026 generally reaches the 2016 tax year and later.
The window moves every January. A year you could have claimed relief on last December is out of reach in the new year. If you are sitting on an old balance, filing before year end can be worth real money for no extra work.
Note what the window limits. It caps relief, not assessment. The CRA can still assess tax for older years where there was misrepresentation or fraud; the ten years only limit what can be forgiven.
You file Form RC4288 setting out the ground, the periods and the amounts, with evidence: medical records, a death certificate, correspondence showing CRA delay, or a complete picture of your finances. Assertions without documents are refused as a matter of routine.
A refusal is not the end. You can request a second administrative review, decided by an officer who was not involved in the first decision. That is where a great many successful files are actually won, usually because the second submission supplies what the first one left out.
After a second refusal the route is judicial review in the Federal Court under section 18.1 of the Federal Courts Act, generally within 30 days of the decision. The court does not decide whether you deserve relief. It decides whether the CRA's decision was reasonable and procedurally fair, and if it was not, sends it back to a different official to decide again.
No. The relief provisions reach penalties and interest only. If you think the tax itself is wrong, that is an objection or an appeal and it has its own deadline, generally 90 days from the assessment. The two processes are separate, they run on different clocks, and you may well need both.
Usually not under that ground — a downturn is a normal business risk rather than an event outside your control. It may qualify under inability to pay, which is a separate ground assessed on your actual financial position: income, assets, expenses and what a realistic payment schedule looks like. Expect to provide a full statement of income and expenses.
Months rather than weeks, and longer where the file is complex or a second review is involved. Interest keeps running while you wait, so a payment arrangement usually runs in parallel. Paying under protest does not weaken a relief request — if relief is granted, the cancelled amounts come back to you.
No. It is a discretionary decision made against published guidance, and a bare request with no stated ground and no evidence gets a form refusal. What moves a file is a specific ground, dated evidence tied to the exact periods you missed, and a clear calculation of precisely what you want cancelled.
Open your file tonight — a licensed Ontario lawyer will confirm everything with you by tomorrow.