Do I have to file the summary if I only issued one slip?
Yes. The obligation falls on Canadian payers who issued non-resident services slips during the year, and one slip makes you one of them. There is no threshold below which the summary is optional, because the summary is not a report of size. It is the document that reconciles the slips to what was remitted. With a single slip the work is short, but it still has to be done, and the total on the summary has to agree with the slip you issued. A nil position on tax changes none of this.
We got a waiver part-way through the year, does that change the summary?
It changes the work rather than the obligation. The summary ties the payer's records to what the CRA received, and where a waiver was granted mid-year it is the place the pre-waiver and post-waiver periods have to agree. In practice that means splitting the year at the date the waiver took effect, checking that what was withheld and remitted before it matches the slips for that period, and that nothing was withheld after it that should not have been. Reconcile the two periods separately and then total them. Reconciling the year as a single block is how mid-year waiver errors stay hidden.
Our payroll provider prepares it, so who is actually responsible?
The payer. The obligation sits with the Canadian business that issued the slips, whoever keys in the figures. A provider preparing the summary is doing the payer's filing, and an error in it is the payer's error. The practical implication is about records rather than blame. The provider usually holds the remittance history, while the payer holds the contracts and the travel evidence that decide which payments were for services performed in Canada. The summary can only reconcile if both sides of that are brought together before it is filed, so agree who supplies what well before the deadline.
The slips and the remittances do not match, what should I do?
Find the difference before you file, because the summary is where it will show. Common causes are a payment converted to Canadian dollars at a different date in the ledger than in the remittance, a fee recorded net of an agent's commission or of reimbursed travel, a payment to a supplier who was not in fact a non-resident, and a remittance posted to the wrong period. Work from the payments outwards rather than from the totals inwards. Identified and explained, a difference becomes a reconciling item you can support. Squeezed into the totals, it becomes an enquiry later.
Is the summary filed separately from the slips?
Think of them as one package rather than two independent filings. The slips report what each non-resident was paid. The summary reconciles those slips to the amounts remitted for the year. Because the summary is built from the same records as the slips, it should be prepared alongside them, and its totals should agree with them line for line before anything is submitted. Preparing the summary last, from the slip totals rather than from the underlying payments, is what produces a set of slips and a summary that do not tell the same story.
We used two payroll accounts last year, one summary or two?
Follow the remittances. The summary's job is to reconcile the slips issued to the amounts remitted, so it works at the level of the account the remittances were actually made under. Where two accounts were used during a year, after a reorganisation, an amalgamation, or simply because a second account was opened in error, each has to reconcile on its own, and slips need to be allocated to the account their related remittances went to. Sorting out which account each payment belonged to is usually the bulk of the work, and it is better done before filing than in answer to a query.
How many days can I spend in a country before I become tax resident?
It depends on the country, and a day count is only ever the start. Many use a threshold in a tax year, some also look at averages across several years, and some have no day test at all and decide on where your home and life are. Two countries can both conclude you are resident, which is what the treaty tie-breaker exists to settle. Counting days without checking the tie-breaker is how people end up filing as resident nowhere. See the residency tie-breaker.
What is cross-border tax?
Cross-border tax is what applies when income, assets or people touch more than one tax system at once — someone living in one country and earning in another, a company selling or hiring abroad, a family holding property in a second country. The work is rarely one country's rules applied harder; it is reconciling two sets of rules and claiming the relief that stops the same income being taxed twice at full rates. See what we do.
