Your personal return is under review. Owner-managers: read this first.

Why owner-managers get more of these

An employee’s return is mostly slips the CRA already holds, so there is little to review. An owner’s return carries judgement: business use of a vehicle, home-office claims, and amounts that have to agree with what the corporation filed. Each of those is a named review category, and none of them is a problem when the records exist.

The support each common claim needs

• Vehicle: the contemporaneous log — kilometres, dates, purpose. Our free log exists because this is the request that catches people without one.
• Home office: the workspace calculation and the bills behind it — and for incorporated owners, consistency with how the corporation treated the same costs.
• Dividends and salary: the T5 and T4 the corporation issued. Where the corporation’s filings and your return disagree, fix the source, not the symptom — the shareholder loan record is usually where the answer lives.

Respond precisely, on time, in writing

Quote the reference number, answer the named lines completely, send nothing beyond them, and respond through the channel the letter states before its stated date. If a claim turns out to be unsupportable, conceding it in the response costs less than defending it into a reassessment — and if you disagree with the outcome, the objection route exists and has its own clock.

General information, not tax advice. A letter’s own wording and dates govern — confirm anything that affects a decision on a free consult.