RC4288: Request for Taxpayer Relief — Cancel or Waive Penalties and Interest
Reviewed by EverStone CPA · August 2026
Quick answer: Form RC4288 asks the CRA to cancel or waive penalties and interest where events beyond your control — illness, disaster, CRA error or delay, financial hardship — prevented you from meeting your obligations. The window is strict: ten calendar years, counted from the year you ask.
What the form is
The taxpayer relief provisions let the CRA cancel or waive penalties and interest — never the underlying tax. When events beyond your control prevent you from meeting your tax obligations, the CRA may grant relief; the RC4288 is the request form.
The qualifying grounds include extraordinary circumstances — serious illness, accident, a death in the immediate family, natural disaster — actions of the CRA itself, including errors and processing delays, and inability to pay or financial hardship.
It is discretionary. Meeting a category does not guarantee relief — the decision weighs your compliance history, how quickly you acted once you could, and whether the circumstances actually explain the specific failures.
Who files it
Taxpayers — individuals or corporations — carrying penalties or interest that trace to events genuinely outside their control. The strongest files pair a clean history with a documented, dated disruption.
It also serves people cleaning up after a bad stretch: the penalties from a hospitalisation year, the interest that compounded while an estate was being sorted, the fallout of a CRA processing error.
The form at a glance
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| What it can remove | Penalties and interest — never the tax itself |
| Grounds | Extraordinary circumstances, CRA actions, inability to pay, financial hardship |
| Window — penalties | Tax years ending in the 10 calendar years before the request year |
| Window — interest | Interest that accrued during the 10 calendar years before the request year |
| How filed | Online through CRA sign-in services, or on paper to your tax centre |
What to have ready before you file
Most of the delay on these is not the form, it is assembling what the form asks for. Have the exact penalties and interest amounts with the years they attach to, a dated timeline of the events that prevented compliance, the documents that prove each event, and evidence the rest of your affairs were handled as well as circumstances allowed to hand before starting.
Gathering it first also surfaces the problems early — a missing account number, a balance nobody has actually calculated, a date that does not line up — while there is still time to fix them rather than after a filing has been rejected.
What catches people out
The ten-year clock is unforgiving and runs by calendar year. A request made in 2026 can reach penalties for tax years ending in 2016 or later, and only interest accrued since 2016 — and nothing revives a year once the window closes over it.
Assertions without documents fail. “I was seriously ill” is a category; a dated hospital record covering the filing period is a case. The CRA decides on the file, and the file is what you send.
Relief and disputes are different tracks. If the penalty itself is wrong, that is an objection with its own deadline — filing an RC4288 does not preserve objection rights, and waiting on a relief decision can run the objection clock out.
Relief has a hard ten-year window: the CRA will only consider penalties for tax years ending in the ten calendar years before the year you ask, and only interest that accrued in those ten years. Every January that passes closes another year for good.
How it is filed
File form RC4288 online through My Account, My Business Account or Represent a Client, or on paper to your tax centre. Say which penalties and interest, for which years, and why — and attach the evidence: medical records, death certificates, disaster documentation, CRA processing histories.
Keep a copy of the request and every document that supports it. A relief request stands or falls on its evidence, and the CRA decides it on what is in the file, not on how the story is told.
Common questions
Can the CRA cancel the tax I owe?+
How far back can relief go?+
What evidence should I include?+
How long does a decision take?+
Where this comes from
- CRA — Cancel or waive penalties and interest
- CRA — RC4288 form page
- CRA — Penalty for accepting a late, amended or revoked election
General information current as of August 2026, not advice for your situation. Relief has a hard ten-year limit — confirm your dates before you write. Please speak with a CPA about your circumstances.
Related reading
- What CRA letters actually mean
- What a GST/HST audit checks
- Every CRA deadline in one place
- All CRA forms we cover
Other CRA forms
Who does this work
A relief request is an evidence brief, not a complaint letter. The requests that succeed reconstruct dates, match each period of non-compliance to a documented cause, and show the taxpayer’s history is otherwise clean — which is assembly work, done once, done properly.
If that is where you are, the service page for CRA correspondence and relief requests sets out what the engagement covers and how it is quoted.
The ten-year relief window closes a year at a time. Email us before the deadline rather than after — we quote the work in writing first.
Email us about RC4288