Despite a rocky start to the 2025 tax filing season, with confusion surrounding capital gains reporting, numerous problems of late or missing T-slips not showing up online, and a looming federal election, there’s “no indication that the tax filing deadline will be extended,” at least according to a media release issued this week by tax preparation giant H&R Block Inc.
The official tax deadline for most Canadians to file our 2024 individual tax returns remains April 30, 2025. If you or your spouse or common-law partner were self-employed in 2024, then you have until June 16 to file (the normal extended deadline of June 15 falls on a Sunday this year). If, however, you owe the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) money, you still need to pay by April 30 to avoid non-deductible arrears interest, currently being charged at a rate of eight per cent, compounded daily.
Due to the reversal of the capital gains inclusion rate hike, which was to impact gains pre- and post-June 25, 2024, and which was recently abandoned altogether, taxpayers who are reporting capital gains realized in 2024 on their returns are being given additional time to file. The CRA announced that it would grant relief of late-filing penalties and interest until June 2 for individuals who need to report capital gains on their 2024 personal returns.
In its release, H&R Block also published the results of a new survey which found that more than one in four Canadians (28 per cent) say they are inclined to delay filing their taxes due to confusion around the recent tax-related announcements with shifts in government. And more than a fifth of Canadians (22 per cent) assume the tax filing deadline will be extended due to recent government shifts and the pending federal election.
Taxpayers should be reminded that if you’re late filing your return, you could be hit with a late-filing penalty of five per cent of your balance owing, plus one per cent of the balance owing for each month your return is late, to a maximum of 12 months. If it’s not the first time you have filed late and you’ve been assessed a late-filing penalty in any of the prior three years, the penalties can double to 10 per cent of the unpaid amount, plus a two per cent penalty for each late month, to a maximum of 20 months.
Add to this the non-deductible arrears interest at eight per cent, and it’s really worth making sure you file (and, ideally, pay any tax owing) by the deadline.
According to the CRA’s individual income tax return statistics for the 2025 tax-filing season, as of April 7, the CRA has already received 13.7 million returns, nearly all of which (95 per cent) were filed electronically. Of the returns processed by the CRA so far, nearly two-thirds of them claimed a refund, with the average refund being $2,000. Given that last tax filing season, 31.3 million personal T1 returns were filed for the 2023 tax year, more than half of us have yet to file.
Part of the delay this year may be attributed to missing slips not showing up online on the CRA’s portals, and therefore being unavailable for download, either by professional tax preparers, or by individuals attempting to file their own tax returns using the CRA Autofill my return service.
This delay is acknowledged by the CRA at the top of its Autofill site, where a warning is displayed saying that “We are aware that some 2024 tax slips are not yet available in My Account, Represent a Client, or through the Auto-fill my return service. We are working hard to make all slips available as soon as possible. If you do not see a tax slip in your CRA account, we recommend using the slip provided by the issuer (e.g., your financial institution or employer).”
When pressed for further information as to the source of the problem, I was informed by the CRA’s media relations team that, beginning in January, the agency introduced a “new validation process for organizations that submit information returns to ensure the data being submitted is accurate.”
The agency explained that it receives tax information slips, such as T4, T3 and T5 slips, from issuers such as employers and financial institutions, and then publishes these slips on taxpayers’ online CRA MyAccount. The reason why some taxpayers are not yet seeing certain 2024 tax information slips on MyAccount or through the Auto-fill my Return service as early as in previous years is linked to “recent changes in how the CRA processes these slips.” The CRA stated that it is “actively working to address any outstanding issues, including consulting with issuers, to ensure tax slips are made available on the portal.”
The CRA advised that taxpayers are still able to file their information by manually entering information from the slip(s) they received from the issuer(s) into their chosen tax filing software, and it expects the majority of outstanding tax slips to be available online by mid-April.
To test the system, I logged on again this week to the CRA My Account, only to find that most of my T-slips were still not posted as of April 8, 2025. My T4 from CIBC was nowhere to be found, several T3 and T5 slips were missing, as were my RRSP contribution slips. Clearly, pushing one button in my tax software to download all my slips like in prior years wasn’t going to work for me this year – at least not yet.
Rather than continuing to wait for the CRA site to be updated, I simply assembled all my physical hard copy slips and electronic slips that were emailed to me, and entered them into the tax software manually. I then pulled up my 2023 tax return to compare last year’s slips to this year’s slips, and, lo and behold, I was missing a T3 slip. It turns out that the “missing” slip was neither mailed nor e-mailed to me, but had to be manually downloaded from my brokerage account where it had been posted in early March 2025.
So this tax season it’s certainly worthwhile taking some extra time to review your return before filing to ensure that you’re not missing any information.