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Part of the delay this year may be attributed to missing slips not showing up online on the CRA’s portals, and therefore being unavailable for download, either by professional tax preparers, or by individuals attempting to file their own tax returns using the CRA Autofill my return service.

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This delay is acknowledged by the CRA at the top of its Autofill site, where a warning is displayed saying that “We are aware that some 2024 tax slips are not yet available in My Account, Represent a Client, or through the Auto-fill my return service. We are working hard to make all slips available as soon as possible. If you do not see a tax slip in your CRA account, we recommend using the slip provided by the issuer (e.g., your financial institution or employer).”

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When pressed for further information as to the source of the problem, I was informed by the CRA’s media relations team that, beginning in January, the agency introduced a “new validation process for organizations that submit information returns to ensure the data being submitted is accurate.”

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The agency explained that it receives tax information slips, such as T4, T3 and T5 slips, from issuers such as employers and financial institutions, and then publishes these slips on taxpayers’ online CRA MyAccount. The reason why some taxpayers are not yet seeing certain 2024 tax information slips on MyAccount or through the Auto-fill my Return service as early as in previous years is linked to “recent changes in how the CRA processes these slips.” The CRA stated that it is “actively working to address any outstanding issues, including consulting with issuers, to ensure tax slips are made available on the portal.”

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The CRA advised that taxpayers are still able to file their information by manually entering information from the slip(s) they received from the issuer(s) into their chosen tax filing software, and it expects the majority of outstanding tax slips to be available online by mid-April.

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To test the system, I logged on again this week to the CRA My Account, only to find that most of my T-slips were still not posted as of April 8, 2025. My T4 from CIBC was nowhere to be found, several T3 and T5 slips were missing, as were my RRSP contribution slips. Clearly, pushing one button in my tax software to download all my slips like in prior years wasn’t going to work for me this year – at least not yet.

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Rather than continuing to wait for the CRA site to be updated, I simply assembled all my physical hard copy slips and electronic slips that were emailed to me, and entered them into the tax software manually. I then pulled up my 2023 tax return to compare last year’s slips to this year’s slips, and, lo and behold, I was missing a T3 slip. It turns out that the “missing” slip was neither mailed nor e-mailed to me, but had to be manually downloaded from my brokerage account where it had been posted in early March 2025.

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So this tax season it’s certainly worthwhile taking some extra time to review your return before filing to ensure that you’re not missing any information.

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Jamie Golombek, FCPA, FCA, CFP, CLU, TEP, is the managing director, Tax & Estate Planning with CIBC Private Wealth in Toronto. Jamie.Golombek@cibc.com.

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