Income Tax

Join two-time Gemini award winning broadcaster and journalist as he shares his keen insights into the world of politics and power. Evan's viewpoint is provocative and challenging and he will leave you thinking about the country and world in which we live and how we can understand how we can make a difference.

This session examines current court cases and some areas of current CRA audit scrutiny and assessing practices, broken down by various topics including income vs. capital, employee vs. independent contractor, small business deduction, deductibility of business expenses, taxability of damages, taxability of employee benefits, collection of tax debts, valuation issues, administration and enforcement and international and cross-border issues.

It is extremely important that the tax practitioner understand how CRA will view treatment of various tax issues. This session will attempt to clear common misunderstandings that might occur when interpreting matters relating to the Income Tax Act.

This session will review some of the rules and obligations incurred when non-resident individuals and business earn income or carry on business in Canada. Among the concepts examined will be permanent establishment, domestic and treaty rules, and other implications of cross-border commercial activity.

The Income Tax Act contains special provisions unique to deceased taxpayers. This session will provide an overview of the opportunities and pitfalls of some of these provisions as well as the practical considerations for filing terminal returns of deceased taxpayers.

This session will provide an update of items of interest to income tax practitioners, including legislative changes, court cases and CRA interpretations. Of particular interest will be a discussion of the effects of harmonization in Ontario and British Columbia that came into effect July 1, 2010.

This session delves in to the legal ramifications that need to be addressed in several areas including the equalization of family property, the planning and implementation of shareholder agreements and asset protection considerations including fraudulent conveyances.

This session is a comprehensive look at the changes and the impacts on the everyday tax practice to the S.116 regime, specifically how the law has traversed from the traditional S.116 regime, the previous budgetary update, to the concept of treaty protected property to the current budget proposals of updates to the taxable Canadian property rules. Included will be the considerations a purchaser must give to the tax status, residence and treaty eligibility of non-resident vendors when buying Canadian properties.

This session will entail a discussion of specific attribution provisions, particularly those in S. 74.1 (1) - 74.4 (2). As well an examination of revocable trusts, indirect payments, transfer of rights to income and interest free or low interest loans will complete the presentation.

This session will deal with the "soft" issues related to succession planning. The role of professionals in succession planning will be discussed in this session along with the discussion of the components of a succession plan, i.e. strategic business plan, estate plan, retirement plan and preparation of successors.

This session will review the major tax changes that have occurred over the past year including a discussion of the Federal Budget and a discussion of some of the more significant CRA rulings and interpretations issued over the past 12 months. It will also examine current changes and relevant issues in taxation that affect individuals and most businesses in the private sector.

Dan is a chartered accountant, tax specialist and a founding partner of Hendry Warren LLP, Chartered Accountants. Dan is a native of Ottawa and a graduate of the University of Ottawa. He has been in public practice since 1983, 10 of these years were with the largest professional services firm in Canada. Dan is a frequent lecturer and teacher for the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants and the Society of Certified Management Accountants. Dan is currently a lecturer for the CICA Income Tax Practice Course and previously tutored participants on that course. He was also a tutor for the CICA In-Depth Tax Course Part I and II (Group Study and In Residence) from 1993 to 2001. He taught at the ICAO School of Accountancy and has been a presenter at the CICA Conference on Income Taxes and the CICA National Conference for SME Advisors. Dan has participated as a lecturer and guest speaker for various professional organizations, including the Canadian Compensation Association and the Financial Management Institute. His memberships include the Canadian Tax Foundation and the Ontario Institute of Chartered Accountants and Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (Canada).

This session will provide the latest update information to advisors to owner-managed Canadian-controlled private corporations, both large and small. The general areas of coverage will include income tax rate updates, tax rate integration planning and illustrations, court cases and CRA interpretive positions to have come out in past year affecting remuneration techniques and general issues on family member employees/shareholder benefits.

This session will be a potpourri of U.S. estate tax and transfer tax issues to highlight and provide basic knowledge for small Canadian practitioners' issue identification ability and assist practitioners in advising Canadians on wealth preservation, estate planning issues and managing the mobile family. It will provide basic tools that would alert/highlight need to access U.S. tax advice, especially pointing out the fact that U.S. school-bound children often find and marry non-residents thus causing cross border taxation issues.

This session's discussion will focus on eligible property and the financial impact of using the capital gains deduction. There will be an overview of three tests; determination of small business corporation, the 24 month ownership test and the holding period asset test as well as looking at the barriers to being a QSBC. The session will finish with planning ideas.

This session will examine corporate borrowing in uncertain economic times and alternatives to debt restructuring e.g. selling assets/selling shares, restructuring debt with new debt or replacing debt with equity. Among other concepts to be developed are the tax implications to debt restructuring and a review of S.80 and the debt forgiveness rules.

This session will look at the taxation of alternative ownership structures, the treatment of certain costs both before purchase and after purchase, various issues with respect to the leasing of real estate, issues arising from the disposal of real estate, issues arising from change in use, replacement property issues, ownership of foreign real estate and the ownership of real estate by non residents. GST/HST considerations and provincial land transfer issues will also be summarized.

Among the many topics of interest to practitioners involved in the purchase and/or sale transaction are S.55 considerations, planning for the share sale or asset sale, earnouts and non-competition payments. Here these topics and others including capital gain considerations in this session on purchase and sale concepts.

This session will answer the questions what is an IPP and what are the advantages and disadvantages of an IPP as well as how to determine current and past service contributions. After looking at the definition of an owner-manager profile and who will benefit, the session will examine retirement options.

This session will evaluate the tax issues that fall out of shareholders agreements. More specifically, certain intended ongoing, estate and post-mortem tax planning concepts may be intuitive and taken for granted with tax practitioners, however they may not actually be attainable to family and non-family shareholder contexts due to conflicts.

This session will deal with the types of life insurance used in tax planning, exempt and non?exempt policies and why they're useful in tax planning, tax free accumulation of assets, types of policies used in buy?sell agreements and the S. 112(3.2) stop loss rule. Planning ideas will be included covering leveraged life insurance and insured annuities.

This session will appraise the advantages and disadvantages, from a tax perspective, of professional corporations including the opportunities for tax deferral, income splitting, capital gains exemption and IPPs. The types of structures to be developed and the use of professional corporations by various professional bodies (e.g. dentists, lawyers, etc.) will also be explored. A comparison of professional corporations amongst provinces and significant CRA rulings and relevant case Law will complete the session.

This session will deal with the income tax implications that arise from the division of assets on divorce. More specifically the session looks at whether transfers of matrimonial property can occur on a tax-free basis, whether income or capital attributes back to the transferor and whether there is any tax exposure to the transferee of the tax liability of the transferor. This session will also deal with tax issues related to child support and spousal support.

If you are using ProFile in your practice, you may not be harnessing the full power of the software for maximum advantage. This session covers some of the advanced functionality in ProFile including

• Going Paperless - using ProFile's HyperDocs feature to enable paperless tax return preparation, and linking reference documentation to tax returns.
• Client Databases - using ProFile's advanced databases to extract information about your clients, create customized client reports, and export client or practice information to Excel.
• Creating specific applications - an introduction to the ProFile SDK (software development kit). Samples to demonstrate automated data import into ProFile, and creating additional customized client reports.

With the transition later this year to International Financial Reporting Standards and its private company counterpart, Private Enterprise Standards, require some specialized knowledge to implement. This session will review what tax practitioners need to know about the new standards as applied to tax reporting.

This workshop is designed to give practitioners a more in-depth look at assisting U.S. businesses establish a Canadian presence. The material presented will be from the perspective of fielding a prospective client call of a U.S. business that wishes to expand doing business into Canada.

This workshop is a continuation of the concurrent session on Post-Mortem Tax Planning and focuses on various tax planning strategies to minimize tax on death.

This workshop will examine two perspectives: US/Canada treaty exemptions and state tax compliance rules and no treaty exemptions. Special attention will be given to tax treaty analysis of US business Articles V and VII and the implications to doing business in US State not aligned to treaty. No treaty exemption provisions will show how to structure US business including use of US or Canadian holding company to facilitate profit repatriation, profit reinvestment and tax consolidating separate entities.

This workshop will review the following risk areas that tax practitioners need to address before they become problem areas:

• Shareholder Appropriation of Corporate Assets
• Inter-Corporate Dividends and Exposure to Capital Gains
• Individuals Selling Shares to Non Arm’s Length Companies
• Corporations with Family Member Shareholders and Exposure to Double Taxation
• Common Situations Restricting Access to the Small Business Deduction