RRSP by prior rep wrong

I have a new client who brought in their RRSP receipts for Jan-Dec 2021. The CPA they were going to has used contribution slips January - December instead of March to February for years.

So now the client brought me their slips from Jan - Dec 2021 for entry on 2021’s return, which is of course wrong.

This happened once before, but it was easily solvable because that client hadn’t been making contributions long. It was only a matter of adjusting one year. This goes back all the way. It would cost them more to pay me to do those adjustments than they would get out of it.

Other than them losing the benefit of last year’s Jan-Feb contributions or opening the adjustments can o’worms, what solutions are there?

I had a case similar to this years ago and addressed the issue with CRA. The agent at that time suggested that for this client, I continue in the same pattern as was done in prior years vs filing adjustment way back to correct the issue. The reasoning used in my client’s case was that the RRSP contributions by period were consistent year after year with no variation, so there would be know tax advantage of filing adjustments to correct it. Your case may be different.

Thanks @kozakworld That makes sense logically and could be why the cpa was doing it. The client may have already been in this pattern when the client first came to him.

I’ll suggest to the client next year that he do those Jan-Feb contributions before the end of the year and the situation will right itself without him “shorting” his own contribution plans.

I’d claim all 14 month’s contributions and be done with it. After all, there’s no rule saying you can’t postpone claiming RRSP deductions. I’ve had this before where a client thought they could not use Jan-Feb until the following year. Following year, I get slips for 1st 60 days of prior year, balance of prior year, and 1st 60 days of current year. I enter all slips and have never had a question from CRA. After all, CRA had the advantage in that they had an extra year to hold the taxpayer’s benefit for those contributions. The time involved in going back X number of years to make corrections isn’t worth the effort. If you try to recover your time, the client isn’t going to see any value. After all, if RRSP contributions are level, the only benefit will be in the first year of corrections. It’s like kiting cheques. You only get the benefit once. After that, you’re just working to cover up your first theft.