When Should the Courts Allow Reassessments Beyond the Limitation Period
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Income Tax Act generally prohibits the minister from reassessing a taxpayer after the expiry of three or four years from the date of the original assessment; however, subparagraph 152(4)(a)(i) allows the minister to reassess a taxpayer at any time where the taxpayer or person filing the return has made a misrepresentation attributable to neglect, carelessness, or wilful default in filing the return or supplying information under the Act.The authors of this article are of the view that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has been asserting with more regularity that subparagraph 152(4)(a)(i) could apply to statute-barred years where the alleged misrepresentation arises as a result of the taxpayer adopting a legal interpretation, based on tax advice, that, although evident in the return, is contrary to the CRA’s preferred interpretation of the issue. This article considers the scope of the reassessment provision where the basis alleged as grounds for its application is essentially a difference of opinion between the CRA and the taxpayer regarding the taxpayer’s chosen filing position.The authors make the case that subparagraph 152(4)(a)(i) should not apply where a taxpayer has received carefully considered advice from a competent tax adviser, has adopted an interpretation that has a realistic possibility of being upheld by a reviewing court, and has fully disclosed its filing position in its tax return. The authors show that this assertion derives support from the jurisprudence, as well as the purpose of the provision itself; that it is further bolstered by the standards invoked to support the application of the tax preparer penalties; and that it is the fair approach to take in light of the current judicial framework for statutory interpretation. They also discuss why subparagraph 152(4)(a)(i) cannot be used to support an assessment under the general anti-avoidance rule.The article concludes with suggestions for legislative and administrative reform that would provide taxpayers with more certainty in the conduct of their financial affairs and help to ensure that the reassessment power in subparagraph 152(4)(a)(i) is limited to those circumstances where it should properly apply.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".