Major announcement

MARCH 27, 2020

For those of you making tough payroll decisions you may be wise to pause until Monday. This flies against our general recommendation that in tough times you need to make tough decisions early but here is the rationale….

The Prime Minister has announced an incredible 75% wage subsidy program for qualifying businesses and the subsidy will be back dated to Sunday March 15th. No details are available so it’s impossible to know who this will apply to (he refers to small and medium business) and what the caps will be.

Business owners will recall that the last 10% announcement for wage subsidy had a cap of $25,000 to any one employer and an individual employee cap of $1,375 – so with no details it’s impossible to tell how much this plan will help.

We will share the relevant details which are expected to be released on the weekend.

Other news from his announcement:

- HST remittance and duties and related taxes deferred until June 1.

- a new loan program offering government guaranteed loans to qualifying businesses for up to $40,000 interest free for the one year. If certain conditions are met $10,000 of the loan will be forgiven. This loan will be administered through the banks.

- an additional $12.5 billion to Export Development Canada and the Business Development Bank to assist financing for small and medium sized businesses.

We will leave editorial comments for later – but the nagging immediate question is: how will we pay for this? The 10% employer program with a $25,000 cap was not enough but 75% seems unaffordable. Time will tell.

Partnerships and Trusts

The government announced a delay of one month in the filing deadline for these important returns until May 1.

At RMT we will continue to file these as early as possible and avoid delaying this process. We appreciate your help in sending in relevant information for your taxes as you can.