Conditions for Acceptance Under the Voluntary Disclosure Program
To rectify your tax situation and benefit from relief under the voluntary disclosure program, your application must be spontaneous, complete and verifiable, and your tax debt must be paid.
Spontaneous application
Your disclosure will not be considered spontaneous if, further to an examination of the facts, we find the following:
- You were aware that enforcement action was about to be conducted with respect to the information being disclosed.
- Enforcement action relating to the information being disclosed was initiated against you, against a person associated with or related to you, or against a third party. In the case of enforcement action against a third party, the purpose and impact of the enforcement action must be sufficiently related to the facts disclosed in the application.
- We have already received information regarding your potential involvement in tax non-compliance or that of a related person (for example, a leak concerning offshore banking or other information that names you).
Complete application
To be complete, your application must disclose, for all fiscal laws, taxation years and periods, all the instances where you failed to meet your fiscal obligations. You must also calculate or estimate your income and the duties you owe.
Your application will be considered incomplete in the following cases:
- You have failed to fulfill other obligations under the applicable fiscal legislation.
- A person you control has failed to fulfill its obligations under the applicable fiscal legislation.
- You are controlled by a person that has failed to fulfill its obligations under the applicable fiscal legislation.
- You are controlled by a person that also controls a person that has failed to fulfill its obligations under the applicable fiscal legislation.
Verifiable application
For your application to be considered verifiable, you must turn over all the available information and documents required to determine the accuracy of the facts submitted and the estimated duties. If you do not do so by the deadline, we will consider your application unverifiable and will deny it.
Tax debt paid
We will not examine your application under the program if the related tax debt is unpaid. You must therefore enclose payment of the outstanding duties with form LM-15-V, Voluntary Disclosure. In situations where it is particularly difficult to estimate the amount of the duties, you must estimate them to the best of your ability and enclose payment in that amount.
In some cases, we may be able to reach a payment agreement taking into account all the amounts due as at the date of the agreement, not only the fiscal debt resulting from the voluntary disclosure.
Voluntary disclosures concerning the goods and services tax (GST) and the harmonized sales tax (HST) are subject to the Canada Revenue Agency's Voluntary Disclosures Program.