Services Chartered Professional Accountant

One tax planning step that is best taken early in the year is to ensure that the right amount of tax is being paid throughout the year. Most Canadians love getting a tax refund – the bigger the better. Receiving a refund after filing the annual tax return feels like getting “free” money from the federal government. In fact, except in very narrow circumstances, the reality is the opposite—it’s the taxpayer who has provided the federal government with the interest-free use of the taxpayer’s money. Getting a tax refund often indicates a failure to plan one’s tax payments properly at the beginning of the year.

To understand why that is so, it’s necessary to understand how and when the tax authorities collect taxes from individual taxpayers. Canada’s tax system is a self-assessing one, in which individual taxpayers file an annual return at a prescribed time, usually by the end of April in the following year, reporting their income from all sources and calculating the amount of federal and provincial tax which they must pay on that income. Of course, very few taxpayers would be able to pay their entire tax bill for the year at one time and the tax authorities are equally disinclined to wait until past the end of the tax year to receive income taxes owed by Canadians. So, for most Canadians (certainly for the vast majority who receive their income from employment), income tax, along with other statutory deductions like Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance contributions, are paid periodically throughout the year by means of deductions taken from their paycheques, with those deductions then remitted to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) on the taxpayer’s behalf by his or her employer.

Many taxpayers like getting a tax refund because they see it as a kind of forced savings plan, and it’s true that if your money is being held throughout the year by the tax authorities, you can’t spend it. And it’s also true that a reduction in the amount of source deductions, while it can amount to a significant sum over the course of a year, is likely to be a relatively small amount per paycheque. Even the most financially self-disciplined among us find it difficult not to spend what seems like a fairly insignificant amount of money when it’s made available to us, especially when it feels like “found” money. The solution on both counts is to have the “excess” amount represented by reduced source deductions transferred into a TFSA or, even better, an RRSP as soon as it appears in the taxpayer’s bank account. Even $20 a week will amount, not including interest, to just over $1000 per year. And, if that $1,000 is transferred into an RRSP, then the taxpayer will have a $1,000 deduction to claim on his or her tax return for the year—and will avoid, in whole or in part, that end-of-February scramble to come up with funds for an RRSP contribution. For a taxpayer who has a marginal tax rate of 40%, a $1,000 RRSP contribution and deduction will reduce the tax bill for the year by $400.