Tax Slips: Why you need them and how you can get them (Part 1)

Tax slips, as you may well know, are slips of paper that contain information about your income tax situation.  You will likely get tax slips from a person or organization that provided you income in a given year.  The type of tax slip you get depends on the type of income you received.  If you worked during the year, you might get a T4 slip from your employer showing a record of how much money you made for that tax year.  If you received PWD or PPMB benefits, you should receive a T5007 slip from the Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation (MSDSI) which tells you how much social assistance you received.

Your tax slips are an important documentary record of the money you received throughout the year.  You will need the information that is on them to be able to accurately file your taxes so it`s a good idea to store them in a safe place once you get them.  However, if you haven`t gotten around to filing taxes in a few years, you may have lost track of a few key tax slips or you may not have any at all.  Do not despair!  If you lose a tax slip, or never received one that you think you should have received, you may have to do a bit of detective work.  However, you don`t have to be Sherlock Holmes to get the information you need.

You have two main options to obtain tax slip information.  First, you might be able to get the information from whoever provided it in the first place, whether it is an employer, MSDSI, or some other party that gave you money.  Getting this information will often be as simple as just contacting the party in question and asking for it.  MSDSI even has a dedicated phone line dedicated to T5007 inquiries (1-877-815-2363).  Make sure you have your personal information handy so you can verify your identity.

Second, you may be able to get your tax slips directly from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).  CRA might not have your most recent tax slips for the current year but they will usually have tax slips for previous years on file.

Although there is no hard and fast rule about whether you should request your tax slips from the slip provider or from CRA, a good rule of thumb is that if you need tax slips for the current tax year it`s probably easiest to ask the tax slip provider to give you the information directly.  If you need information from previous tax years it`s probably easiest to request the information from the CRA.  There are a few reasons that getting this information directly from CRA can be a good option.  They will usually have all of the tax slips you need from multiple different parties, which saves the hassle of needing to request information from all of your tax slip providers.  Also, the CRA will be able to tell you which year you have not filed your taxes in addition to letting you know which tax slips they have for you.  This saves you the guesswork if you are not 100% sure which years you need to file.

That does it for part one of this three part blog post.  Part two and three will go into more detail about this topic, focusing specifically on ways to request information from the CRA.  Part two will be published on August 28.

Update: Contrary to original expectations, we’ve decided there is enough material on this topic to add a third entry.  As scheduled, part two will be posted on August 28.