Increased CRA Tax Audits of Real Estate Transactions

The Canada Revenue Agency has recently been actively monitoring and tax auditing real estate transactions in British Columbia, as it has been previously doing in the GTA (Toronto area). CRA has added 50 income tax auditors and 20 GST auditors in BC who are focused on detecting and tax auditing a number of different tax aspects of real estate transactions. These include profits from property flipping that are not being reported or are being reported incorrectly as income instead of capital gains, unreported capital gains, unreported GST/HST on the sale of new or substantially renovated homes, and ineligible GST/HST new housing rebate claims. Our Canadian tax lawyers have recently dealt with all of these tax audits.