Cleo Hamel is clearly enamoured of her profession’s oddities. The senior tax analyst at H&R Block in Canada spends a lot of the tax season touring the country talking up the ways Canadians can more effectively deal with their inevitable income tax returns. But she loves the strange occurrences that crop up: like the time a farmer tried to write off the cost of owning a cat to keep varmints away from his blueberries (he was successful in getting Canada Revenue Agency to recognize the cat as a legitimate expense to curtail rats (1)), or the lawyer who quit his job to play poker and wanted to write off the expenses, which wasn’t so successful. “It turns out CRA didn’t think it was a legitimate occupation (2) and it didn’t help that he wasn’t a very good poker player,” says Hamel, who is based in Calgary.
Hamel admits these are the oddities that occur every year when CRA wades through the $189 billion in personal income tax it collects. The truth is most Canadians would benefit from simply looking at the basics. Hamel argues that regardless of whether a person has someone else do their taxes, Canadians should bring themselves up to speed on what they are paying each year (3). “Just because you have a friend or third party doing your taxes, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be paying careful attention to what’s going on with your own taxes,” she says.
Aside from tax arcana, there are plenty of regular issues that experts suggest might alter the bottom line of the average tax return. “Everyone is talking about tax time driving them crazy, but I say to them that at the end of the year you’ve already paid tax,” Hamel says. “Filing your tax return isn’t about paying money — it’s about getting money back. And when talking about tax deductions or credits, people need to think about getting money back and there are little things within that they don’t consider.”
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