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Income tax — charitable donation to US religious school

Tuition for religious instruction in Canada is accepted as a charitable donation, under CRA Information Circular 75-23. The administrative policy in that Circular allows a school that is a charity and teaches both secular and religious studies to allocate tuition fees to religious studies for this purpose, and to allocate community support to the secular studies, thus maximizing the value of the credit.

I applied this principle to tuition paid to a religious school in the United States, providing evidence from the school as to the extent to which the tuition fees were allocable to religious studies. The CRA originally disallowed the donation credit, but I filed a Notice of Objection explaining how Information Circular 75-23 could be applied to a US school when combined with a provision in the Canada-US tax treaty that allows US charitable organizations to be treated as Canadian charities for Canadian tax purposes, to the extent the taxpayer has US-source income.

The CRA Appeals Officer agreed, and allowed the credit.

A creative way to obtain tax relief!

(2005)