Hi all, I am hoping for some additional guidance on tax filing requirement for my spouse for 2016. So here is the story: I was living and working in Canada on a work permit in 2016 and my spouse obtained an OWP and visited Canada for 2 weeks, and because he had an open work permit, they issued him a SIN on arrival at the airport. But he had no bank account, no health card, and had a full-time permanent job in India. He then moved to Canada in June 2017 on OWP, and eventually became a PR in August 2017. He also had income for all years starting 2017. So has filed his taxes for 2017-2020. But our question is whether he would be considered a tax resident for 2016? On the surface it appears that he was not required to file taxes since he did not have any Canadian income, did not owe taxes, and did not want to claim any benefits (
Do you have to file a tax return?), but we have found conflicting resources where it appears that he may be have to file since he will be considered a resident with significant ties (
Determine your residency status) as I (his spouse) was living and working in Canada. Any similar experiences from members of this forum and the approach you took would be greatly appreciated.
We are aware that we are required to file only for 3/5 years for the citizenship application, and he meets that requirement for 4/5 years (2017-2020). However, we would like to answer the 'Required to file' part of the question accurately as 'Yes' if he was required to file. Also, if he was indeed required to file, we prefer to file the tax for that year and then apply. In that case, we see that we can't NET file for 2016 anymore and will have to do a paper filing which takes about 6-8 weeks. So our question is: Once we have sent the paper filing, do we have to wait for the tax return to be assessed before we can send our citizenship application assuming that by the time our application is processed, the return will be assessed? Or will they want to see that it was assessed on or before the date we signed the application?