it's a fact!

i was going to pen a story about how mean several people have been today, but instead i am going to tell a rev can story with a happy ending. that’s right folks – it’s a story about revenue canada and it doesn’t end with an audit.

the last few days i have been fretting about making a contribution to an rsp this year (for those of you in the US – this is a retirement savings program like a 401 K that gets tax breaks on it). yeah – i know – i must be rich to even be considering such a thing. i have never before put money in anything except for a simple bank account. the main reason i have been thinking about this is because when i get my retroactive pay on the collective agreement, i want to put it straight into an rsp and thus avoid being taxed at 55% on that money – then at least it will work to my advantage come tax-time next year.

(who ever thought that *i* would be blogging about such mundanity….)

those of you who care about such things will know that rsp-deadline for this tax year is march 1st, but since i’m going away at the end of next week, i needed to get this wrapped up. so i decided to login to the rev can website and access my tax info from years past (to see what my contribution limit was up to). what i thought was my login info just wasn’t working, so i called their help desk.

i didn’t even have to wait on hold! and the guy who answered told me that i would find my login info on last year’s assessment record – to which i said “actually, since i started e-filing 4 years ago – i have not ever received any assessment records in the mail – can you look up why that would be?”

it turns out that since 1999, they have not had a current address for me on file – even though i work for the federal government, and even though i have filled out my new address on the e-file every year for the past three years. apparently i did not fill out a change of address form (i mean – c’mon – how stupid is that?)

he and i walked through the address updating steps together – but the real upshot of this is that they have been getting my mail bounced back to them for the past several years including over $800 in refund cheques. that’s like free money! or something.

besides all of that, the guy on the phone was really very helpful, and also quite pleasant. yup – it’s a fact – a revenue canada story that doesn’t suck.