Death and Taxes.

I find it interesting that CRA sees itself as a fair and reasonable entity. Yet more and more silliness shows up via the internet.
Just as in China, web cams have changed the face and behavior of government workers, here in Canada the Internet does the job.
Keep reading as we are now going to increase our coverage of CRA goof ups.
For more info on tax problems and solutions got to [1] www.taxauditsolutions.ca

The following case illustrates that CRA can and does make silly mistakes.

Dan White

N.S. man in a life-and-death struggle to convince taxman he’s alive

Ken MacKay may be angry and losing patience, but he’s definitely not dead.

Global News and Canwest News ServiceApril 21, 2010

Ken MacKay may be angry and losing patience, but he’s definitely not dead.

Ken MacKay may be angry and losing patience, but he’s definitely not dead.
Photograph by: Photodisc, Photodisc

HALIFAX Ken MacKay may be angry and losing patience, but he’s definitely not dead.

So imagine his surprise when he opened a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency declaring him officially deceased. It’s happened not once, but twice.

In January MacKay received a first letter from the tax agency telling him that he was no longer eligible for a GST rebate because he was dead.

“I was shocked, like I just couldn’t believe how anybody could make a mistake like that,” he said, adding he asked if the agency hadn’t mixed him up with his wife of 34 years, who died in October from a lung ailment.

“They told me no, that that didn’t happen, but indeed I’ve come to find out afterwards that that’s exactly what happened.”

He said he was later given the runaround, being passed from one government department to another.

When he told the bureaucrats he was alive and well, he was assured the matter would be straightened out. However he is still listed as dead on paper.

“It was pretty hard to take, especially the second time around,” he said of an April 1 followup letter from CRA again asserting his non-living status.

Mackay said he’s claiming on his income tax phone bills and other expenses he incurred while trying to prove he’s alive.

“If it happens a third time, then somebody will be held accountable,” he said.

It isn’t the first time this has happened in the province. Theresa Fraser, 76, who lives in Nova Scotia’s Pictou County, asked for an apology earlier this year after the federal government stopped delivering her cheques following a mix-up involving her name. She too, it turned out, had been mistaken for dead twice by the government.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/canada/life+death+struggle+convince+taxman+alive/2935250/story.html#ixzz0lrerOCZi