revenue canada typo

I hate taxes.

I also hate bookkeeping, which is why I am so abysmal at it. I hired an accountant this year to help me. He is a very cool accountant. He wears a ponytail and is a talented guitarist. He is also very patient with my boxes of crumpled receipts.

I lined up at Revenue Canada to get as many of my tax returns as I could (assessment summaries, really) and discovered that someone had made a typo while entering my gross business income five years ago. The typo added a decimal place, resulting in an extra $80,000 being added to my income. The final total wasn't affected, but I was still pretty appalled that this sort of thing could happen.

I called Revenue Canada. The woman on the other end was highly skeptical until she called up my records on her computer, and then she was silent for several long seconds. She then told me I had to line up at the Revenue Canada offices to report the error. I told her that no, I had just finished lining up at the Revenue Canada office and didn't want to do so again and besides, it was their error and not mine. Several more seconds of silence, and then she told me to send a letter to Revenue Canada explaining the problem.

"Does this sort of thing happen a lot at Revenue Canada?" I asked. "Typos like this, I mean."

"Oh no, not very often," she replied reassuringly.

Hm.