Case Background:
Ms. M. is the director of a company located in North Bay, Ontario. She reached out to Farber Tax Solutions after the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) had taken legal action against her company, by sending a Requirement to Pay to freeze the corporate bank account.
The company had fallen behind with remittances for GST and Source Deductions due to a prolonged period of slow business, and the CRA collector assigned to the accounts was taking an aggressive stance.
The legal action was seriously impairing the company’s ability to maintain normal operations, pay their staff and their expenses, and make any payments at all to the CRA.
The Farber Tax Solutions Approach:
The company was not in a position to resolve the arrears through an immediate payment in full, but was anxious to negotiate a long-term payment arrangement that would allow them to resolve the corporate debts to the best of their ability to pay.
In order to demonstrate the company’s actual financial position, we worked with Ms. M. to prepare full financial disclosure in accordance with the CRA’s collections policies. A complete disclosure and the company’s proposal for a payment arrangement was submitted to the collector.
After multiple attempts to reach the collector, the proposal was rejected outright by this collections officer. We then proceeded to speak with the collector’s Team Leader, to discuss the proposal with someone more experienced and with more authority.
We subsequently received a call from another agent who was equally aggressive, and who was pressuring the company to commit to payments beyond their ability to pay.
Before we were able to complete this negotiation, we were referred back to the original collector, who informed us that the proposal demanded by the second agent, who we were led to believe was a manager, had been rejected.
We later discovered that these 2 agents were both in fact Collections Contact Officers – the most junior level agent in Collections – and were misrepresenting themselves and playing games in a very unprofessional manner.
We immediately proceeded to prepare a letter of complaint advocating on behalf of our client, outlining all the multiple abuses of the CRA policies that these Collections staffers had committed, and restating our request to negotiate an equitable arrangement for the client.
This letter was sent to the Director of Collections at the Sudbury Tax Service Office.
The Result:
Within a day, we were contacted by the actual Team Leader. She offered an apology for the unprofessional behavior on the part of these two junior officers.
This Team Leader accepted the original proposal made by the company and authorized the immediate release of the frozen bank accounts.
While we had secured the desired payment arrangement for our client, there were some residual issues that still needed resolution.
Payments and remittances had been missed during the period of time the bank account had been frozen, and so we continued to communicate and negotiate with Collections to ensure that the company was given the time and opportunity to catch up to the best of their ability, while keeping their payment arrangement in good standing.