The Foundation
Here are several reasons that we consider personal tax returns returns to be among the very most important things we do.
First, everyone’s got to file one.
Second, personal tax returns have become shockingly complicated over the years, and legislation changes every single year, opening and closing the doors to certain tax-saving deductions and strategies.
Third, if you’re married, and especially if you have children under 16, the ability to move certain tax credits and deductions from one spouse to the other can save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and is almost certainly worth the fees to pay someone to do it right.
Finally, your personal tax returns is the basis for nearly all social benefits (such as all Child Tax Benefits, the GST credit, Working Income Tax Benefit, Guaranteed Income Supplement, Old Age Security, and all of the Provincial tax credits), so the importance of optimizing the entire spectrum of taxes and social benefits cannot be understated.
If your current accountants haven’t proven to you how they are taking all of this into consideration, (or proven that none of these apply to you, which is often the case), you need to book an appointment with us, NOW.
We stand in front of our work.
Whenever we’re not 100% sure about how to deal with certain rare situations that arise (no one knows the entire Tax Act), we will take the time to find out how to complete the work properly. It seems obvious to us that the best possible way to stay out of trouble with CRA and complete your taxes as optimally as possible involves getting it right the first time. Sometimes it’s frustrating, but we would rather delay than get it wrong.
We do our work with the highest possible level of integrity.
This isn’t always easy, because what you want and what CRA wants are usually diametrically opposed. So we focus on making sure your taxes are optimized without doing anything that would come back to haunt us in a subsequent audit. To this end, we avoid certain types of clients. If you’re uncertain about whether you’re on our Avoid List, you probably are; we aren’t going knowingly let you lie or cheat. Ever.
We stand behind our work.
When we do make a mistake that causes you a fine from CRA, we will pay the fine. To be very honest, it’s happened several times, and we just HATE paying them, but when it’s our fault we’re relatively happy to do it, because we feel quite strongly that even though no one is perfect, you shouldn’t have to pay for our mistakes.