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Carleton Student Wrongfully Lost $11,000 to Canada Revenue

By Editorial Staff
  |  
  2 Min Read
Carleton Student Wrongfully Lost $11,000 to Canada Revenue
Photo: Heather Gilberds

Photo: Heather Gilberds

It’s that dreaded time of year again, tax season, and one Carleton University PhD student has a little more resentment than the rest of us against, you guessed it, Canada Revenue Agency.

In 2010, Heather Gilberds was awarded more than $45,000 in scholarships. The Ottawa resident has been fighting a battle against Canada Revenue ever since. Being a full-time student, she was not required to pay tax on her scholarship money, but a mistake of not filing the right form got the CRA hot on her trail.

Gilberds returned to H&R Block, where she initially filed her taxes, four or five times in the following years to file the correct form and to have her case reassessed. The CRA insisted that she owed them $11,000 in taxes for the scholarships she got, claiming that she hadn’t sent in the proper form or that they hadn’t received it.

Fast forward to 2013, and Gilberds got another notice which she took to the senior manager at the H&R Block branch she was dealing with. This time, she thought the case was resolved and her troubles were over. Two weeks later, $11,000 went missing from her bank account.

In a case described as ‘outrageous’ by the H&R Block manager, Gilberds was informed by her bank that Canada Revenue Agency withdrew the money from her savings account by way of a legal demand payment.

The next step, Gilberds says, will be to speak to a tax lawyer to see what remedial action she can take. Documentation proves that she filed the correct form several times since the beginning of her case and the CRA is now reassessing her file for the sixth time!

When questioned, the CRA said…you guessed it again…‘they cannot comment on specific cases.’

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