Hold On to Your Tax Return

By 250 News

Revenue Canada  says it should be just a few more days  before  they can start processing tax returns.

Last week,  software maintenance caused a glitch that  prevented taxpayers from accessing  electronic services like NETFILE, TELEFILE and EFILE .  Canada Revenue says  it had to shut down  public access to  electronic  services to ensure the integrity of taxpayer information.

While Revenue Canada says it has a team working on the problem to bring everything back to normal but it  will still be a few days.  In the meantime,  you cannot file your tax return electronically, and Revenue Canada cannot process returns filed by  paper, or electronically before the system crashed.

It also means that with no processing, no  refund cheques.

That is bad news for  lots of Canadians.  Already a million tax returns have been filed electronically and Revenue Canada figures there are another 24 million yet to be filed by the deadline.

Will Rev Canada extend the  filing deadline?  Too early to say. 

Tax preparers say they can still get the paperwork ready, but the real hardship is for those who  have filed and are waiting for their cheque.   The tax preparers say it puts extra stress on clients who are  waiting for those refunds and on the companies  who prepare the  returns for them because  although it is a Rev Canada problem, it is the  tax preparer who is  left  contacting the clients to tell them about the delays, and make  enquiries to ensure  files they Think   are in the  rev canada system are in fact where they should be.

Whle Revenue Canada  wrestles with  trying to bring the system back on stream,  one accountant asks  this very  basic question. "Just what were they thinking when they decided to run a software maintenance program in the height  of tax time?"

Updates on the  status of the system repairs are available  by clicking here.

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