Do I need to come to your office?
No, though you are welcome to: we have offices in India, the USA, Canada and the UAE. Documents move through a secure portal, and meetings can be in person or by video, arranged around your time zone. Clients in the Gulf, India, Europe and across North America all work with us the same way.
Does it matter which of your offices handles my file?
No. The same named reviewer signs off, the same authorisation is filed with the tax authorities, and the same fixed fee is agreed in writing before any work starts.
Do I have to report my parents' bank account in the Philippines?
It depends on what your name on it actually means. An account you own, or own a share of, is your foreign property whether or not the money in it came from you. An account you can merely sign on, held and owned by a parent, is generally theirs. The difficulty is that many family accounts are opened for convenience and the paperwork does not match the intention, so the bank's records say one thing and the family understands another. We start from the account-opening documents and the deposit history rather than from what everyone assumes, and set the position down in writing before anything is reported.
I send money to my family in India every month, is that taxable?
Sending money is not itself a taxable event in Canada. You are moving income you have already been taxed on, and there is no Canadian gift tax on the transfer. What can matter is what happens at the other end. If the money buys property in your name, or sits in an account you own, you now hold foreign property and an obligation can follow from the holding rather than from the transfer. If it is a loan rather than a gift, interest paid back to you is income here. That distinction is worth documenting when it is made, because reconstructing it years later is far harder.
I inherited a house in the Philippines, does the CRA need to know?
An inheritance is not income in Canada, so nothing is taxed when you receive it. Two things follow from holding it. The house is foreign property from the date you acquire it, and whether it falls inside Canada's foreign property reporting turns on its cost and on what it is used for rather than on what it pays you. And the cost you carry forward is set by reference to its value when you acquired it, not by what the original owner paid, so establishing that value now is what protects you when the house is eventually sold. A dated valuation obtained at the time is far easier than an argued one later.
Does an NRE or NRO account in India have to be reported in Canada?
Treat the Indian label and the Canadian treatment as two separate questions. Whether interest on the account is exempt in India does not decide whether it is taxable here: if you are resident in Canada, interest credited to the account is income on your Canadian return in the year it arises, whether or not you bring the money across. The account is also foreign property, and the reporting question turns on what you hold rather than on what you earned. Statements are the usual obstacle, because interest is credited in another currency and on a cycle that does not match the Canadian year, so the figures are converted and reconciled rather than transcribed.
My Winnipeg accountant says foreign accounts are not their area, what now?
That is a reasonable thing for them to say, and it does not mean starting again. Most files of this kind are split: your existing accountant keeps the domestic return they already know, the foreign asset and account side comes to us, and the boundary between the two is written down before anything begins. Both halves work from the same figures, so nothing is prepared twice and the two do not contradict each other. The fixed fee covers the cross-border piece only and is agreed in writing before work starts. Your accountant keeps the relationship and the file.
Do I need to report foreign accounts that earned no income?
Often yes, and this is the most common misunderstanding in family-corridor files. Canadian foreign property reporting is triggered by what you hold, measured by cost, not by what it paid you. A dormant account, an empty plot, a flat occupied rent-free by a relative: none of them produce any income at all, and each of them can still need to be disclosed. Because there is no income, nothing on the return prompts the question, which is why these are usually found years afterwards rather than in the first season. The holdings list is the right place to start, not the income list.
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.
Is the sale of foreign property taxable where I live?
For a resident, yes — worldwide gains are taxable, and the gain is computed in your own currency, so the exchange rate at purchase and at sale changes the number even when the local-currency price did not move. The country where the property sits usually taxes it too, often with a withholding or clearance step before closing, and that tax becomes a credit. A principal residence relief may apply to a home abroad on the same terms as one at home. See principal residence and foreign property.
