I read an article this morning about the Canadian Revenue Agency collecting on back taxes. Their collection departments are back in full force once again to the levels they had prior to the COVID revamping. 

The CRA originally shut down their collections departments in the latter part of 2020, and stopped, or at least minimized, collecting overdue taxes from people. Obviously, there were some larger cases that they kept working on, but for the most part they were put on pause for COVID efforts.

I've always told my clients that if you owe money to the CRA, you may need to make regular and reasonable payments. If you make regular reasonable payments then they will leave you alone 9 times out of 10. I say 9 times out of 10, because there's always that one agent that's going to take it upon themselves to make it their lifelong goal to collect your money. I have some clients that owe the CRA $30,000 and never get a phone call, and I have other clients that owe the CRA $3,000 and get a phone call once a week. It really does depend on which agent is on the other side of the desk.

It’s very inconsistent.

It's difficult for accountants to explain to our clients how things are normally treated because normal isn’t really a thing. If you're making payments on your back taxes, I usually tell people that they should have a payment that pays their taxes off in somewhere between 12 and 18 months. If you owe $12,000, that would be $1,000 month. Then you're going to keep paying because you're going to be paying next year's taxes, and hopefully you have another successful year and you owe taxes again. Remember owing taxes is a good thing- that means you made money.