Home Office Tax Deductions Simplified - More Changes May Come Yet:
The Canada Revenue Agency is making changes to the Form T2200 - which is the form the CRA requires employers to sign confirming an employee’s eligibility to claim expenses - in order to simply home office tax deductions, in response to changing work habits during the COVID-19 pandemic. The CRA hosted a consultation with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce on September 11th to this effect, where it was made clear that a simplification was necessary.
Since, the CRA has released a a draft simplified Form T2200, called: Declaration of Conditions of Employment for Working at Home During COVID-19 (“Form T2200 Short”). The draft proposes that the requirement for a taxpayer to work from home does not have to be in writing. The “contract of employment” (the language used on the form) can simply be an agreement, or “meeting of the minds," between the taxpayer and their employer that they must work from home for some time during the pandemic. Further, the draft form clarifies that a taxpayer will be permitted a deduction for home-office expenses if the taxpayer was required to work from home at least half of their working hours during one or more periods of four continuous weeks in 2020.
Read more from the Globe and Mail here.
Canada Revenue Agency Encourages Failed CRB Applicants to Try Again This Week:
The Canada Revenue Agency is now recommending that some applicants re-apply for the CRB (Canada Recovery Benefit) starting 6 AM EST Monday morning, after the Agency was hit with dozens of complaints from applicants over seeming technical bugs and glitches, after the new benefit was launched.
The benefit, intended to partially replace the controversial CERB (Canada Emergency Response Benefit), has been beset by problems, due to its complicated relationship with Canada's Employment Insurance regime. Those who qualify for EI, are expected to apply and access those support programs during the COVID-19 pandemic moving forward, and those who do not qualify for EI were expected to apply for the CRB - which provides $500 per week in support, the same as the CERB. However, many applicants have claimed that although they do not qualify for EI, the CRB computer system is telling them that they are ineligible for the CRB, and to apply for EI.
Read more from CBC News here and here.
OPINION - Forget OECD Tax Dreams, Widen GST/HST:
Jack M. Mintz - a President’s Fellow at the School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, and the Chair of the Alberta Premier’s Economic Recovery Council -has published an interesting perspective in the Kingston Whig Standard regarding the OECD's BEPS Project (Base-Erosion and Profit Shifting) and their latest published study on digital taxation, released this past Monday.
Mintz writes that "while Canadians already pay digital service taxes when they purchase services from domestic digital companies, imported digital services, such as Google’s advertising revenues or Netflix subscriptions, are largely exempt. With GST/HST tax rates averaging 10 per cent across the country, we would get more revenues by expanding the tax base in this way than by entering into a complex OECD corporate tax scheme. Quebec has already moved in that direction."
Read more from the Kingston Whig Standard here.
OPINION - Ottawa Should Tax Tech Giants, Not Treat Them Like an ATM:
In a similar vein to Jack M. Mintz's piece regarding the BEPS project and digital taxation, Professor Michael Geist - the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law - writes in the Globe and Mail that the currently proposed digital "taxation" scheme from the Government of Canada (although they don't like to call it a tax) is treating "the internet like an ATM with the ability to withdraw cash from one sector and deposit it into another and, perhaps not coincidentally, keeps control over the money within Canadian Heritage rather than the Ministry of Finance."
Geist continues, stating that "absent a global solution, the government should be prepared to explore a made-in-Canada approach that would allow it to drop the harmful cross-subsidy model that risks increasing costs for consumers in favour of a general tax revenue approach that can be transparently incorporated into Canada’s standard budgeting process."
Read more from the Globe and Mail here.