Chan's Personal Blog

The other week, I got a letter from Revenue Canada. I thought to myself, that's odd, it's too early for a GST rebate cheque, and it's too early for next year's tax stuff, so what could this possibly be? This can best be summarized by this dialogue from an episode of Family Guy where Peter Griffin is expecting a tax return.

In the words of Peter Griffin:
Peter: It's better than I thought! An Audi! I'm gettin' a car!
Brian: Uhhh, Peter, there's a "T." That says "audit."
Peter: No, Brian, it's a foreign car, the "T" is silent. Sweet, I'm getting an Audi!

I didn't get a full blown audit on my taxes, but I did get a tax review. Apparently the government doesn't believe how much money I claimed for tuition last year, so they want me to send them a copy of all my tuition tax receipts to prove my claim. I guess my claim could appear suspicious as the amount claimed is pretty high if you compare it to other university students.

There's three reasons why the claim could look suspicious though. First, amount claimed is higher than the average for tuition, but in general, tuition for computer scientists are higher. Secondly, I went to school year round which means the amount I spent was even higher than the average (a lot of programs only do two semesters of school a year, I did three in a year). Finally, the main reason why I'm getting reviewed is probably because I did my taxes online last year (for the first time).

Doing taxes online is kind of strange. You fill out all these forms electronically, and then you submit it to the government. All of your tax receipts are NOT required, so you don't actually send a hard copy to the government. So, essentially the government doesn't have hard proof for what you're claiming. As a consequence, a tax review is a way to check if people are cheating on their taxes I guess. Strangely enough, if you do your taxes using the traditional pen and paper method, Revenue Canada requires that you send in a hard copy of all your tax receipts.

Anyway, I mailed my supporting documents in, and we'll see how quickly they get this resolved. I'm a little torn over how I should do my taxes for next year. File them online, and get my tax return faster, but have a higher chance of getting audited. Alternatively, go old fashion and file my taxes with pen and paper where I would get my tax return later (by 6 weeks approximately), but have a lower chance of getting audited.