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Income tax — intercompany charges deductible

My client, a small manufacturing company, had set up a U.S. subsidiary to enable it to sell into the U.S. market. It provided the U.S. company with funds to operate its office and to service its clients, and charged these amounts to "warranty expense". The CRA reassessed the Canadian company to disallow some $2 million of these intercompany charges as not being justified. The auditor came up with a whole raft of reasons to disallow the expense, including the fact the charges were made by journal entry, the amount of warranty work had not been fully documented, a lack of accounting information provided for the U.S. company, and the fact that large adjusting entries were made at year-end.

I filed a Notice of Objection and met with a team from the CRA's Appeals Division at my client's factory. In preparation, I arranged for the client to have all the U.S. subsidiary's records sent up to the Canadian company, and we went through them in detail to organize them and show that all of the payments made from Canada went to legitimate expenses in the U.S.

I was able to demonstrate that the payments in question were needed to keep the U.S. operation going so as to generate some 2/3 of the Canadian company's sales. As I explained to the CRA officials, it did not matter whether the payments were labeled "commissions", "warranty expense", "operational support charges", "management fees" or anything else. They were a necessary cost of doing business. I also explained that we needed a quick resolution to the case, because the large assessment was causing the bank to pull the company's financing and the company would be forced out of business.

The CRA officials quickly agreed to cancel the reassessment.

Problem vanished!

(2006)