At this time of year, a lot of accountants’ attention is spent on deadlines.

The deadlines that I’d like to address today are for filing your older tax returns electronically, and when you can start filing your 2021 personal tax return. 

The date for filing your old tax returns - in this case ranging from 2017 to 2020 - is January 28th, 2022. That is the last day that you can file those returns until February 21st, which is the first day you can file a personal tax return. After February 21st, 2018-2021 personal tax returns can be e-filed. 

There was some confusion this year, and some misinformation out there on the net. At one point, word was that it would be on an earlier date this year, but the Canadian Revenue Agency has confirmed that it will definitely be on February 21st.

For our office, tax season doesn't start until March 1st. In fact, there's a lot of our clients that have T3 forms, which are due to be sent to the CRA by the deadline on March 31st so taxpayers may not receive these until sometime in April. 

So a lot of times people will have T3's and we can't do their tax returns until April. I'm not sure why the CRA extended those, probably because they're big, fancy, rich, pocket filling corporations that have to file them, I'm guessing, but that's just my opinion and I don’t know the actual logic behind it. 

If you are late filing your 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 returns. if you don’t have them in the next few days, you’ll have to wait for another month.