Personal Tax Return
Need to Change Your Return?
It’s easy to correct your income tax and benefit return if you realize after filing your return that you made a mistake.
Important facts
You will have to wait to receive your notice of assessment from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) before you can make a change to your return.
There are three ways to correct your return once you’ve received your notice of assessment:
• use the “change my return” option found in My Account
• send a completed Form T1-ADJ, T1 Adjustment Request
You will also need to provide any supporting documents for your change.
Tips Are Taxable Income
Canadians who earn tips that must be reported on annual income tax and benefit returns. Restaurant servers, hairdressers, valets, taxi drivers, and others who earn tips may not have all of their income recorded by their employers, which means that their T4 slips may not include all of their income.
It is your responsibility to keep track of any earnings that are not reported on your T4 slip.
Avoid Penalties for Missing Slips
Missing a slip on your tax return can be expensive.
T4s that you get from your employers aren’t the problem – you work all year, you’re not likely to forget you earned that income and have to pay tax on it.
But slips for investment income, including bank interest and dividends on stocks, are easier to overlook. The number and types of investment income slips you get can change from year to year, so it’s hard to know if anything is missing.
And they often do go missing, for example if you’ve moved in the year and neglected to notify every institution where you have money invested.
- The first time you miss a slip it’s no big deal. CRA has copies of all your slips on file, and their matching process double checks to make sure all the amounts they expect to see on your return are there. If they notice a missed slip for the first time, they just adjust your return and taxes accordingly and send you a Notice of Reassessment to inform you of the reason for the change.
- The second time you miss reporting that slip, the penalty is 20% of whatever income is on the missing slip, plus interest on the tax and penalty owing.
If you have received a notice of a missed slip, contact the issuer of the slip as soon as possible to find out what went wrong and correct it. Make sure they have your correct address in their files so nothing goes missing again.