Why does the CRA ask people to fax or mail them documents they should alsready have?

[brunes]

So, I got a request from the CRA for us to fax or mail them a copy of our T2202A showing our tuition amount. This is fine, I of course have the certificate on file and will fax it tomorrow.

So I was getting it prepared, and realized - this form by itself proves basically NOTHING. My wife printed it out on our home computer from the university website. It is a stock T2202A with the school name/address, and the amounts auto-filled into it. There is no kind of a unique ID for reference, not even her student number.

Essentially, I could open it up in any PDF editor and fill in any numbers I wanted, and the CRA could not tell any difference - ASSUMING OF COURSE IT IS NOT CROSS-CORRELATED with the school records. Which obviously it must be (at least I hope the CRA are not idiots and do check these things)

Which leads me to the next question. Assuming therefore that the school must have records of all of these students, and that they must have already provided them to the CRA, why does the CRA need me to fax them anything at all? Can't they just look this stuff up?

[Electricute]

why should they look it up for u? you are the one trying to get a tax credit, they could care less if u claim it or not. think of all the students in canada, u think CRA gonna look up each person's tuition?

+ schools do not send the info to CRA, once again it's for a tax credit. Now if you worked for the school and made money then they would send CRA a T4.

as for trying to committ fraud, go ahead and try, CRA has ways of double checking everything claimed, if they have doubts, they can easily deny a claim

[brunes]

why should they look it up for u? you are the one trying to get a tax credit, they could care less if u claim it or not. think of all the students in canada, u think CRA gonna look up each person's tuition?

You see, we have this magical device nowadays called a computer.

It should not take any time at all to type in someones SIN number and bring up all of their eligible tuiotion claims as they would have had to have been submitted with the univerity's records.

schools do not send the info to CRA, once again it's for a tax credit.

as for trying to committ fraud, go ahead and try, CRA has ways of double checking everything claimed, if they have doubts, they can easily deny a claim

I don't see how they could verify anything unless the school submitted the information to the CRA.

I am not going to commit fraud, I am just trying to understand why this seeming inefficiency in the system exists. It should all be automatically detected and correlated by the system.

[dutchca]

The beauty (or beast) of a self administered tax system.

It is up to you to have proper books and records and submit/verfy to them.

IMO they are asking you to submit to ensure the issued copy, although just downloaded and printed from the website, agrees to the copy (most likely electronic information) supplied to them from the educational institution.

I have come across situations where issued T4's are different than the info submitted by the employer to the CRA.

They are simply insuring the info they get is accurate.

[WHO]

If I wanted to be ironic, I would answer that it's also a very effective way for the CRA agent to put your file back on hold while you send the info. That way, he/she can go back to whatever else he/she does during the day. These people need to plan their next week-end/vacation/trip/etc.

You should see and/or hear about things that go on in these offices. Anything your imagination can come up with is probably plausible. Don't even need to get the mythbusters involved.