Tax & Trade Blog

The FCA has ruled against the Bank of Montreal (“BMO”) (2021 FCA 189) in its challenge of the Minister’s decision to deny BMO’s input tax credit (“ITC”) allocation methodology under section 141.02(18) of the Excise Tax Act. This will likely be bad news for certain institutions that elect to use their own methods for allocating ITCs within complex corporate groups.

As with have blogged about many times in the past (see here, here, here, and here), one of the most misunderstood areas of the law around corporate directors is the concept of director’s liability for the corporation’s unremitted tax.

Several recent cases in our practice have reminded us of the critical importance of these rules and how all directors can benefit from a refresher of their basic structure.

Quebec has special rules regarding the mandatory disclosure of “nominee agreements” (which are essentially the Quebec civil law equivalent of undisclosed agency agreements) where the agreement is made as part of a transaction or series of transactions that have “tax consequences”.

We previously blogged about a Tax Court of Canada (TCC) case on the tax status of credit card/payment processing services provided by Visa. In that case, the TCC held that Visa’s services constituted the supply of “administrative services” and were therefore excluded from the definition of a “financial service” in subsection 123(1) of the Excise Tax Act (ETA).

The Federal Court of Appeal (FCA) has now reversed the TCC decision, holding that Visa’s services were in fact exempt financial services.

The determination of whether a transaction is a ‘sham’ has been a longstanding issue in tax law, but one that has seemingly been the focus of a number of CRA projects across a number of different industries, including a current project in the international long-distance minutes business, where the CRA says that businesses are involved in the so-called carousel sham!