Speaker: “Moving on. What can we do to this Ill-Nicky kid? Tax people?”
Tax Rep: “Hmm. We could reject all of his tuition credits from last year as a tax deduction, then surprise him with a bill for unpaid taxes…”
Speaker: “And…”
Tax Rep: “Nine days before we will start charging interest on them…”
Speaker: “And…”
Tax Rep: “Hmm, make sure he gets the letter just after traveling for a whole day, and while jetlagged?”
Speaker: “That will have to do. He should at least be glad he didn’t earn more money in the previous year for us to tax him on. Speaking of which, I see he has some student loan arrangements, what can you people offer me?”
Loan Rep: “We could allocate less than half the funds we did last year, when his educational expenses and personal assets were the same.”
Speaker: “Not bad, anything else?”
Loan Rep: “We could let him know just a week before classes start… just after he has travelled for a whole day and is both jetlagged and infected with illness!”
Speaker: “Not bad at all. I can always count on you guys.”
Speaker: “Now, you fellas at Disasters and Emergency Preparedness really haven’t been pulling your weight at these meetings. I just hope you have something extra special in the works.”
It looks like your friend Alex’s blog has been either discontinued or hacked and turned into a spam blog. You probably want to remove your links, since Google does not look kindly on sites that link to such infectious pages.
jackasses!
That’s crap!
I sympathize with you. Something similar happened to me last year. All of a sudden I owed $1000 in 21 days! Like either of us is rolling in that kind of dough.
The strangest thing is that they think my personal disposable assets have risen by at least $10,000 this year. Unless an electric kettle, a couple of books, and a map of the world are worth rather more than I paid for them, this seems unlikely.
I have no idea how these tax credits or asset assessments work, but I gather they’re not giving you much money.
Still doing research assistantship work? Or bursary/teaching work?
Ben,
The credits work as such: if you spend, say, 5000 Pounds a term in tuition per term and take three terms in a year, they grant tuition credits for 15,000 Pounds. Those basically counteract any income you made. So, if you earned 20,000 Pounds that tax year, only 5000 would be taxable (before other deductions).
My tuition for the last tax year was much more than my earnings, hence the serious problem of the credits not being granted.
On paper, I am supposed to be doing six hours (60 Pounds) worth of RA work per week. In fact, I have done about that much since the start of August, both because of other plans of mine and those of Dr. Hurrell.
“My tuition for the last tax year was much more than my earnings, hence the serious problem of the credits not being granted.”
But surely you didn’t earn that much anyway? Or do you not have personal allowances etc? (I can automatically earn c£4,500 without paying income tax – and I don’t get near that)
Ben,
The tax people want about 500 quid from me, on the basis of adjusting my tuition credit claim from a very considerable amount to zero.
Hopefully, the challenge being launched by our accountant will succeed.
Some tax news from today:
1. Reinstated your original claim of $25,955 for tuition.
2.Reinstated your original claim of $4000 federal and $2000 provincial
claim.
3.Once they process your adjustment, will send you a notice of Reassessment.