Ms. Fung sought judicial review of CRA’s refusal to cancel penalties and interest for her failure to file the T1135 on time. (The case isn’t clear whether Ms. Fung filed only because she was caught.) CRA did not accept her excuse that she was affected by the need to care for her premature infant (the facts contradicted her). She also said she didn’t know she had to file a form if she had no income to report.
“[9] Ms. Fung says that she was unaware that she had to file her T-1135 return by the statutory deadline if there was no money owing. Ignorance of the law is not, however, an excuse, and was not a matter beyond Ms. Fung’s control. It would not have provided a basis for the granting of discretionary relief under subsection 220(3.1) of the Income Tax Act: Sandler v. Canada (Attorney General), 2010 FC 459 (CanLII), at para. 12.”
“[10] Insofar as the birth of Ms. Fung’s child was concerned, as was noted in the second-level decision, this occurred some 10 months before Ms. Fung’s filing deadline for her T-1135 return. The onus was on Ms. Fung to satisfy the Minister’s Delegate of the existence of circumstances that would justify the granting of relief. Ms. Fung did not provide any medical evidence to the Minister’s Delegate to support the claim that she made for the first time in her Memorandum of Fact and Law that her child required “intensive care for an extended period of time”, and there is no evidence in the record that was before the Minister’s Delegate that would support this claim.
“[11] It was up to Ms. Fung to provide evidence to support her request for relief to the Minister’s Delegate. It was not up to the Minister’s Delegate to tell Ms. Fung what kind of evidence she had to provide to support her request. Ms. Fung did not provide any information as to the type of care that was required by her child, nor did she explain why she was unable to obtain the services of a tax professional in a timely manner, even though it appears that she had used the services of a tax professional in the past to prepare her tax filings, and she ultimately retained a tax professional to prepare her 2011 T-1135.”
For a Tax Court case where the Court excused a taxpayer who failed to file a T1135 because he had no tax payable for the year and so filed it late with his T1 return, see Douglas v. The Queen, 2012 TCC 73 (Woods)