I just filed a client’s T1 and $500 of his refund was transferred to a phantom Covid-19 benefit account. This client has never collected Covid benefits, never received and there was nothing owing in the CDE when I downloaded from AFR .
As a background, his account was hacked in Jan 2021. Someone changed his bank account and applied for Covid benefits. He reported it to the fraud line when discovered in April 2021. They did an investigation and told him he was cleared. And now 2 years later $500 is randomly withheld from his account. Obviously I can’t phone CRA and a notice of objection is not appropriate because he was assessed as filed. What are the steps to take here?
I have a client going through a similar situation. Someone had somehow accessed her CRA MyAccount and was able to change her direct deposit information where the scammers had claimed $4k CERB benefits and the scammers had even collected their GST and trillium benefits. It’s been more than a year since my client had reported to CRA about the fraudulent claims. To add salt on wounds, the CRA would be transferring the calls to different departments, it’s like they were not prepared to deal with this at all.
In my client’s case, we’ve been submitting documents through the online submissions options, just waiting for a confirmation from the CRA to reverse the penalties and interest that had occurred. We’ve also requested to the CRA to provide us written confirmation that the matter has been resolved, we’re not going to rely on anything verbally. We’ve also held back on filing her 2022 tax return until the matter has been resolved, thankfully she doesn’t owe any taxes.
My client had spent around 4 hours with various junior CRA agents, thankfully a senior agent was able to generate a reference number for the issue. They also had advised to the client that they would need to provide their direct deposit information and the bank statements for the particular months that the CERB claim was made. And here I was, assuming that the CRA had 2FA set up but I guess this was done before all of the fraudulent CERB claims were being made. So far, my client hasn’t received a notice of determination letter but the complex part is whether or not the CRA would pay for GST and CAI payments again. It’s just an awful situation that could’ve been avoided had the CRA put in necessary protocols for having 2FA as a mandatory requirement. It also doesn’t help when I found out that my client had stored all of their passwords on their mobile device so there’s that
