One of the practical pieces of tax advice that I continuously dole out to clients, friends and family members each year is the critical importance of keeping receipts for any deductions or credits you plan to claim on your tax return. While this goes without saying for obvious items such as charitable donations and eligible medical expenses, it’s perhaps even more important to keep receipts of other expenses, such as employment or business expenses, that you plan to deduct on your return to lower your final tax bill.
Depending on your tax bracket, those receipts can be worth more than 50 cents on the dollar. Consider the self-employed, high-income earning Vancouver-based IT consultant who spent $1,000 in airfare to visit a client in 2025. At her top marginal tax rate of 53.5 per cent, hanging on to that receipt could save her $535 in real hard cash taxes that she otherwise would have to remit to the Canada Revenue Agency by April 30, 2026.
That’s why I encourage anyone who claims employment or business expenses to carefully track them and keep those receipts. That can be done “old school,” by physically hanging on to the relevant receipts and filing them in a paper folder for tax season. Alternatively, many of us are now in the habit of taking a picture of the receipt (or scanning it) and saving the receipts in an online “tax folder”, by year, stored virtually in the cloud, so that these receipts are all together in one place come tax time.
If you incur substantial business or employment expenses each year, I would go so far as to recommend a separate credit card so that you can easily segregate your work expenses from your personal expenses, especially when it comes to some retail purchases that could be either. For example, was that recent Staples purchase tax-deductible office supplies or a large back-to-school stock-up for the kids?
The importance of keeping receipts to justify your expenses came up yet again in a recent decision of the Federal Court of Appeal released late last month. The issue before the appellate court was whether the lower Tax Court erred in disallowing additional deductions for motor vehicle expenses incurred by the taxpayer in connection with his employment. While it was clear that the taxpayer travelled for work and qualified for various employment expense deductions permitted under the Income Tax Act, the Tax Court concluded that the deductions should not be allowed because the taxpayer did not provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate the amount that should be deductible.
I first wrote about this case last year, so before reviewing the decision of the appellate court, here’s a brief summary of the facts. The taxpayer was appealing reassessments of his 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 taxation years in which the CRA reduced or denied certain expenses claimed in each of those years.
The taxpayer, a visiting registered nurse, was simultaneously employed by four separate employers in 2015 and three separate employers in 2016, 2017 and 2018. His job was to provide nursing services to individuals in their own homes or in a retirement or nursing home. During the tax years under review, he provided nursing services six days one week and four days the next week on a rotating basis. Each week included two or three seven-hour night shifts during which he was on standby for patients who required urgent care.
The night before each workday, his employers would provide a schedule of the patients he was to visit the following day. The taxpayer estimated he visited between 10 and 30 patients during a day shift, and he worked an average of 40 to 45 hours per week, plus the two to three seven-hour night shifts.
Each employer paid the taxpayer a fixed amount for each patient visit, regardless of the nursing services provided. He travelled daily from his south-central Ontario community to visit patients in the Greater Toronto Area. The taxpayer deducted various automobile expenses in each year, which were denied.
Under the Income Tax Act, to be able to deduct vehicle expenses as an employee, you must normally be required to work away from your employer’s place of business or in different places, and you must be required to pay your own automobile expenses, as certified on Form T2200, Declaration of Conditions of Employment. In addition, you must not be the recipient of a “non-taxable” allowance for motor vehicle expenses. An allowance is considered non-taxable when it is solely based on a “reasonable” per-kilometre rate.
The taxpayer may have been entitled to claim some of these as valid expenses, but he was unable to supply any evidence to back up the expenses he had claimed. He testified he had previously provided the records to the CRA by registered mail, but the CRA never received them, and he was unable to provide any backup documentation in court.
This proved to be fatal for the taxpayer’s claim in Tax Court. “Maintaining books and records is an ongoing obligation in a self-assessing system and the taxpayer’s failure to do so … made it impossible for him to meet the evidentiary burden … to demolish the (CRA’s) assumptions” about the denied expenses,” the lower court judge wrote, citing a prior case.
The taxpayer appealed the Tax Court’s decision to the Federal Court of Appeal, which heard the case at the end of May. The three-judge panel of the appellate court considered whether the taxpayer had provided sufficient evidence as to the amount of his expenses to justify a deduction on his return.
The taxpayer tried to argue that, notwithstanding having any receipts or backup documentation, he was found to be a “credible witness” by the Tax Court judge, and thus his testimony as to the amount of expenses he had incurred and claimed on his tax returns should simply be believed.
The appellate court disagreed, writing, “it was not a matter of disbelieving him; it was a matter of the (taxpayer) failing to present sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the amounts claimed were in fact deductible.”
Bottom line – you could be the most honest, believable and trustworthy taxpayer, with a perfect record of tax compliance stretching back decades. But, if you are unable to back up your tax deductions with hard evidence, you are unlikely to be successful in the face of a CRA review.