Tax owing still applies but “to be fair to all, the CRA grants a higher level of relief to those who are correcting an error before being contacted than those who are correcting errors after being prompted by communications from the CRA or any other authority of administration.”
How to quality for the VDP
There are five primary conditions for the VDP. The disclosure must:
Be voluntary
Include information that relates to a tax year/reporting period that is at least one year/reporting period past the due date
Involve the application of a penalty or interest
Include all known errors or omissions
Include a payment or a request for a payment arrangement
Recent changes to the VDP
New guidelines began on October 1, 2025 that impact disclosures related to income tax, sales tax, withholding tax, excise duties, and several other taxes.
The application form has been simplified. The four page Form RC199, Voluntary Disclosures Program (VDP) Application can be completed by a taxpayer or their authorized representative. It contains a brief description of the facts relating to the omission or error.
The filer must also address the payment of any tax owing, if applicable, or request a payment arrangement to be discussed with a CRA collections officer.
Eligibility has also been expanded; if a CRA communication about a potential non-compliance issue prompts the disclosure, it may still be accepted. This differs from past practice. As a result, a CRA education letter about ineligible deductions or unreported income may not prevent a taxpayer from benefitting from the VDP.
What are the relief provisions?
There are two tiers of relief that can apply to taxpayers submitting a VDP application:
General relief. This is meant for those who come forward voluntarily without a nudge from CRA. All of the penalties can be waived by CRA, and 75% of the interest on the balance owing.
Partial relief. An application that is prompted by CRA can still benefit from a full waiver of penalties. However, only 25% of the resulting interest is waived if a CRA communication is what leads to the VDP application.
What to do if you have made a tax filing mistake
If you have unreported income, overstated deductions, or overlooked elections, among other tax filing errors, you should seek to rectify those mistakes as soon as you can.
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An unprompted VDP application can be less painful from an interest perspective and help you sleep better at night if you are aware of an oversight. Although you can file a VDP application on your own, if you do your own taxes, consider getting professional input for a situation like this.
Jason Heath is a fee-only, advice-only Certified Financial Planner (CFP) at Objective Financial Partners Inc. in Toronto. He does not sell any financial products whatsoever.
Like many early adopters, Benjamin Alarie was working with artificial intelligence well before it hit the mainstream. A business law professor at the University of Toronto, he founded the legal tech startup Blue J in 2015 with hopes of applying predictive AI to tax law.
But only a few years later, generative artificial intelligence—the segment of AI best exemplified by ChatGPT, Claude and other text-generating chatbots—was finally taking off. Users were buying in, private capital was flowing and what had once been a powerful but unflashy software segment was suddenly the center of a consumer-facing boom.
By then, Alarie told VentureBeat in a recent profile, Blue J had hit a ceiling, with revenue leveling off at around $2 million a year. So he made a high-stakes gamble and went all-in on the emerging genAI trend.
“Large language models seemed like a very promising direction,” Alarie says of his pivot. Blue J’s earlier tech, predictive machine learning, couldn’t answer every question users asked of it—“Which was really the holy grail,” the Blue J chief executive explains—leading customers to abandon the tool when it let them down.
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Says Alarie: “I had this conviction that if we continued down that path, we weren’t going to be able to address our number one limitation.”
Yet the generative AI boom offered a way out. After giving his team six months to get him a new product, and then honing the resulting system’s outputs over the last few years, Alarie says that by now he’s cut Blue J’s response time down from a minute and a half to just seconds, and more than quadrupled its net promoter score from 20 to over 80.
He also credits a partnership with software giant OpenAI, which gives Blue J early access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence models in exchange for real-world feedback.
It’s all paid off for the company. VentureBeat reports that Blue J’s $122 million Series D, announced this summer, secured the legal tech startup a valuation over $300 million. More than 3,500 different organizations are reportedly on the firm’s client list, including several Fortune 500 companies.
“What once took tax professionals 15 hours of manual research to do can now be completed in about 15 seconds,” Alarie told VentureBeat. “That value proposition—we can take hours of work and turn it into seconds of work—that is driving a lot of this.”
The UK government appears determined to press on with its plans to hike taxes for gambling operators despite warnings from industry leaders that such measures could harm jobs, drive players toward unregulated websites, and reduce funding for British sport. Lawmakers are considering a proportional system with higher taxes for more harmful types of gambling.
Online Gambling Can Be Especially Addictive
A recent report from the Treasury Select Committee urged the government to resist what it described as “industry scaremongering” and to impose a tax rate that reflects the growing social harm from online betting games. The report comes just weeks before Chancellor Rachel Reeves presents her first Budget as the UK faces mounting pressure to address a sizeable fiscal deficit.
The cross-party committee, chaired by Dame Meg Hillier, stated that online gambling now constitutes almost half of the UK’s total gambling revenue. The report notes that while traditional betting, such as horse racing and bingo, can usually be enjoyed safely, online casino games and virtual slots have created a new generation of high-frequency, high-loss gambling.
Online betting games are extracting huge amounts of money from people who have been funnelled into the most addictive, harmful corners of the industry via their love of sports, or the occasional game of bingo.
Dame Meg Hillier, Treasury Select Committee chair
The committee’s findings are based on months of evidence sessions examining how to strike a balance between tax policy, economic growth, and social responsibility. MPs dismissed arguments that higher taxes would push consumers toward unregulated operators, instead recommending harsher crackdowns against illegal offshore sites.
Gambling Operators Attempted to Downplay the Commission’s Concerns
Gambling industry representatives remain firmly opposed to any potential tax hikes. Grainne Hurst, chief executive of the Betting and Gaming Council (BGC), argued that regulated gambling is already one of the UK’s most heavily taxed sectors, contributing £4 billion ($5.27 billion) annually to the Treasury and supporting over 100,000 jobs. She cautioned that a tax hike could have rippling consequences for the broader economy.
Hurst also informed MPs that the industry invests heavily in safer gambling practices like affordability checks, stake limits, and data-driven monitoring systems. However, the Treasury Committee remained unconvinced. Its report criticized the industry’s claims that gambling caused no social harm and pointed out that gambling platforms exploit player data and behavioral patterns to encourage longer play and higher losses.
The impacts of problem gambling in our communities are plain to see, and the industry’s boldfaced claim to our inquiry that it does no social harm is staggering.
Dame Meg Hillier, Treasury Select Committee chair
Reeves’s upcoming Budget could clarify whether online casino and slot games will face a higher tax rate compared to sports betting. Treasury sources have suggested that MPs are considering leaning toward a more graduated system based on the relative risk of harm. With the government showing no signs of yielding to industry pressure, the days of uniform gambling taxation may be numbered.
SALEM — While there are contested mayor’s races this Tuesday in Beverly and Peabody, in Salem, there is none.
Mayor Dominick Pangallo is running unopposed for a full four-year term — after first winning a special election in 2023 to fill the remainder of Kim Driscoll’s term — and is looking ahead to what he says is a crucial time for the city to advance its long-term goals.
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