What is the penalty for filing Form T400A late?
There is no late-filing penalty on the objection itself. Form T400A is not a return, so it does not attract the charge people are searching for. What it has is a deadline, and the cost of missing it is the loss of the right to have the assessment reconsidered rather than a sum of money. Filed inside the deadline, the assessment is under objection. Filed outside it, you need an application to extend the time for objecting, or you are left with a relief request, which can reach penalties and interest but never the tax.
How much is the CRA late filing penalty on a return?
For the 2025 tax year it is 5% of the balance owing at the filing deadline, plus 1% of that balance for each full month the return is late, to a maximum of 12 months. A higher rate applies where the agency had issued a demand to file and had charged a late-filing penalty in any of the three preceding tax years: 10%, plus 2% per full month, to a maximum of 20 months. That is the charge that often sits on the assessment being objected to, which is why the two questions get searched together.
Can I still file an objection after the deadline has passed?
Sometimes, through an application to extend the time for objecting. It is a different exercise from the objection. The application has to explain why the objection was not made in time, which means dates and evidence about the taxpayer's own circumstances rather than argument about the assessment. The merits still matter, because there is little point extending time for an objection that cannot succeed, but they are not what the application turns on. Where an extension is not available, the route that remains reaches penalties and interest only, so a dispute about tax effectively ends there.
Does interest keep running while I object to an assessment?
Yes. Interest compounds daily on an unpaid balance and nothing about an objection changes that. The penalty is the opposite: once charged on a return, the late-filing penalty is a fixed amount and does not compound. That asymmetry has a practical consequence for anyone objecting to a large assessment. Paying the balance, or part of it, while the dispute runs stops the compounding without conceding the point, and it removes the part of the exposure that grows purely with time rather than with the strength of either side's argument.
I want to dispute a penalty, not the tax. Am I too late?
Two different questions hide inside that one. If you are saying the penalty was charged in circumstances that should not have attracted it, because the conditions for the higher repeat rate were not actually met, for instance, then that is a dispute about the assessment and it belongs inside the objection deadline. If you are saying the penalty was correctly charged but the cause was beyond your control, that is a relief request, and it runs on its own look-back limit rather than on the objection deadline. Being late for the first does not make you late for the second.
Will the CRA collect the balance if my objection was late?
An assessment that is not under objection sits in the ordinary collection position, so a late objection leaves the balance exposed in a way a timely one may not. That is the practical cost of the deadline and it is usually larger than whatever the merits are worth arguing about. Where the objection period has gone, two things are worth doing at once rather than in sequence: put in the application to extend time, and deal with the balance itself, because interest compounds daily on whatever is unpaid while the position is sorted out.
How would a foreign tax authority know I am resident there?
Mostly from information you or your bank already provided. Account-opening forms ask you to self-certify tax residence, and that certification is reported between authorities under the Common Reporting Standard or, for US accounts, under the FATCA framework. Beyond that: employer and payroll filings, property registries, immigration records and the tax filings of anyone who paid you. The realistic planning assumption is that the data arrives. See FATCA and information reporting.
What happens if I have not filed for several years?
Missed years are handled as one package, not one at a time, because the route chosen for the first year determines the relief available for the rest. Each country has a disclosure or relief programme with its own conditions, and entering the right one — before the authority contacts you — is usually what keeps penalties down. Filing quietly outside a programme forfeits that protection. See catching up on missed returns.
