August 29, 2024

As in past seasons, this year we used the Autofill My Return function to download the T slips for our clients.  However, these downloaded T slips did not include any of the GAINS T slips, which come as T5007s.

GAINS or Guaranteed Annual Income System is a provincial payment made by the Ontario Ministry of Finance to top up the income of a senior, much like the federal government does with the Guaranteed Income Supplement.  To receive GAINS, a senior must be receiving Old Age Security (OAS), the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), private income (from a workplace pension, the Canada Pension Plan, interest earned on one’s bank account balance, for example) and have filed an income tax and benefit return.  In 2023, the maximum that a senior could receive was $1,992.

Given that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) encourages volunteers to use the Autofill My Return function (which we like for many reasons) we were surprised to see no GAINS T5007s in the CRA’s database when using Autofill My Return.  To address this, for clients who had brought their paper T slips to their interview, we looked through these to find their T5007 for the GAINS they had received.  But not clients brought their paper T slips to the interview.  For clients who were receiving GIS, we asked them about their GAINS.  Some knew but many did not know what we were talking about.

When we asked our CRA CVITP regional coordinator why T5007s for GAINS did not appear on clients’ files in the CRA database, they replied:

“T5007s should be issued by the end of February for the previous year like other slips.  Please check to see if this slip appears in RAC (Represent a Client) and if it does not the client would need to contact the issuer for any missing slips. AFR [Autofill My Return] or not, it is the client’s responsibility to report all income.”

Unfortunately, this did not answer our question.  (If the T slip is not downloaded using Autofill My Return, then it will very likely not appear when using the Represent a Client function either.)

Given that many clients may not remember all the income they received during the tax year, it does not promote volunteer confidence in the Autofill My Return function when the CRA argues that, regardless of the results obtained from using Autofill My Return, we should rely on the client’s memory.  We hope that the CRA will correct this so that T5007s for GAINS appear in the CRA’s database for the 2025 tax season.

Tell us about your experience in getting GAINS T5007s for your clients.