CRA says eBay gave us the wrong Billing Authorization form

[allinthemindtreasures]

Hey just a heads up, CRA did a review on my GST/HST billing authorization form. If you completed the form eBay provided it is wrong unless you are in Quebec. The form we should have all had them sign and send back to us has CRA on the top left instead of sureté Québec. My Input tax credit are at risk of not being reimbursed because this form is wrong. The email addresses for Canada gst/pst @ eBay is no longer valid and it was confirmed by an agent that they no longer monitor that. I am having a heck of a time getting them to fix this. I just spent an hour on the phone and had to resend my form to a portal that no one can say for sure they will get it signed properly. I would recommend you check your forms since this is the most crucial part of the audit process. On CRA’s website it is called gst506 form. The forms are not that different from each other. So make sure it is Cra in the top left and not Quebec if you do not live in Quebec. I fear that since eBay has abandoned this tax process and not being able to fix this with eBay will cause mass audit for all of us who have filled out this form. Just a heads up as CRA is clearly on an online rampage right now and the proper form signed is a major part of what they are auditing me.

[marnotom!]

As far as I know, this is the version of the form that eBay was issuing when all this first went down last year.  ("First went down?"  Whatever.)  It contains eBay's info pre-filled in, and has both the Revenu Quebec and Canada Revenue Agency logos on the top, so it should be good enough for your purposes and those of CRA.

[phc64]

The forms we were provided by eBay a year ago, with "Revenu Quebec" in the top left and "Canada Revenue Agency" in the top right, is the correct form, regardless of the vendor's province or territory of residence. This is because the QST is collected by the Canada Revenue Agency, unlike the provincial sales taxes of other provinces who have not harmonized their sales taxes with the GST. The provincial sales taxes of all other non-HST provinces are collected by that province's own tax authority.

It would appear that the OP is dealing with a confused CRA official, a situation with which I also have experience.

[allinthemindtreasures]

Yes, unfortunetaly we can all say that this form is right, except CRA is not accepting it.  Here is the right form that they need me to redo and will not allow my audit to close until I have it.

https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/cra-arc/formspubs/pbg/gst506/gst506-22e.pdf

[allinthemindtreasures]

It is not.  I can attest that CRA is quite angry that we used the Revenu Quebec form and have advised me that (I) need to get eBay to fix this or else they are witholding my return.  I can give you the name of the CRA agent if you would like to verify with him.  He has advised me that his supervisor is looking into why eBay provided us with the wrong form.  It is quite a mess on my end and may become a big bureaucratic mess for all of us if eBay does not fix it. 

[allinthemindtreasures]

I am not!  Their supervisor refuses to close my audit because it is deemed non compliant.  I am going through an audit and am sharing what CRA has advised.  Have you had your form reviewed by CRA?  If so can you pleaswe give me the name of that agen.  I have been dealing with Wanda Young who is the team leader for this department.  She is the one not accepting this form.  Also, there is no arguing with CRA you need to do what they tell you and once they provided me with the link to their policy it was clear that eBay provided us with the wrong form. 

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publications/forms/gst506.html

On this policy you can see that the revenue Quebec form is not even available because that is a Quebec form only.  Trust me, I wish they were wrong and my I would not be fighting with them.  But they are witholding my return until I provide them with the proper form. 

[allinthemindtreasures]

It is frustrating to have fellow sellers say that I am wrong when the fact is; I am sharing this to prevent you all from the heartache that I am experiencing.  It is not one confused agent.  It is their team leader who is anxisously waiting to see if eBay is going to make it right or if they will leave me hang and dry.  The email address for this process should have never been deactivated and they should have done a better job to provide us with the right form.  It is not as if they said my form is wrong and did not prove to me why it was wrong.  They sent me the link to the right form and why it needs to be that form.  So no, not confused agents, the revenue Quebec form is non compliant and we all need to get the right form re-done. 

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publications/forms/gst506.html

[marnotom!]

I don't think anybody is saying that you're wrong, @allinthemindtreasures.  @phc64 is saying that you have a confused CRA employee on your hands and I'm inclined to agree.

Doing a bit of online detective work, I will say that the CRA employee is correct; eBay does appear to have used Revenu Quebec's version (19) of the 506, which can be found here:

https://www.revenuquebec.ca/documents/en/formulaires/fp/FP-2506-V%282021-04%29.pdf

However, the form that you're being directed to fill out, the 506 (22) doesn't have provisions for QST.  I'm no accountant by any stretch, but from what I can see, because eBay is charging and collecting QST from buyers from Quebec in addition to GST and HST from other provinces, the QST information has to be included in the authorization.

I really don't think eBay Canada would have pre-filled and posted a 506 (19) without advice from an accountant or CRA itself, so either eBay Canada received inaccurate advice or else the team leader you're dealing with didn't get the memo about eBay Canada being a marketplace facilitator with a national reach.

I'm going to tag devon@ebay who is a liason between discussion board users and eBay staff in the hopes he can get this issue on the radar of eBay Canada staff.  In the meantime, maybe some other users can give you some suggestions on how to placate the CRA team leader.  My wife was subject to a random audit on her personal tax return a number of years ago but as I don't remember anything extraordinary about the process, I can't help you there.  Good luck.

[allinthemindtreasures]

Sadly, from what I am being told by CRA there was no liaison between them for this huge change.  I spoke to the accountant handling my audit again and he advised that the only way for them to contact eBay is to initiate a full audit on all of our billing authorization forms.  He also informed me that due to the legislation that was written by not being compliant and having us fill the wrong form it means that eBay would need to reimburse all of us the tax that they collected for us to remit to CRA.  The revenue Quebec form is only for Quebec residents.  This was yet again confrimed to me today. 

This is now becoming a huge issue in the GST/HST section of CRA and the higher ups are looking at it.  My position is that eBay is not signing the proper copy I have sent to them and therefore I am being put in a position where I now owe this money that I did not collect.  My return is being withheld and I am being told that there is no way for CRA to advise eBay.   CRA saw the communicaiton (https://pages.ebay.ca/salestax2022/) and advised me that it is riddled with miss information and that we should not have followed it.  (our mistake I guess.)   I would love to think that eBay knew what they were doing here, but am now realizing my audit was not done by accident.  It appears that they knew that eBay was giving us the wrong information and are now using that to get access to everyone information.  The best thing to do if you have signed the revenue Quebec form is for you to get the right form and get that signed properly. Failure to get this massive error fixed in time will result in CRA auditing all of us.  That is what I was told today.  Not trying to be fear mongering, this is just a fact.  Just sharing what I am being told by our bureaucrats. 

[devon@ebay]

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@marnotom! wrote:

I don't think anybody is saying that you're wrong, @allinthemindtreasures.  @phc64 is saying that you have a confused CRA employee on your hands and I'm inclined to agree.

Doing a bit of online detective work, I will say that the CRA employee is correct; eBay does appear to have used Revenu Quebec's version (19) of the 506, which can be found here:

https://www.revenuquebec.ca/documents/en/formulaires/fp/FP-2506-V%282021-04%29.pdf

However, the form that you're being directed to fill out, the 506 (22) doesn't have provisions for QST.  I'm no accountant by any stretch, but from what I can see, because eBay is charging and collecting QST from buyers from Quebec in addition to GST and HST from other provinces, the QST information has to be included in the authorization.

I really don't think eBay Canada would have pre-filled and posted a 506 (19) without advice from an accountant or CRA itself, so either eBay Canada received inaccurate advice or else the team leader you're dealing with didn't get the memo about eBay Canada being a marketplace facilitator with a national reach.

I'm going to tag devon@ebay who is a liason between discussion board users and eBay staff in the hopes he can get this issue on the radar of eBay Canada staff.  In the meantime, maybe some other users can give you some suggestions on how to placate the CRA team leader.  My wife was subject to a random audit on her personal tax return a number of years ago but as I don't remember anything extraordinary about the process, I can't help you there.  Good luck.

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Hi @marnotom!! Thank you for tagging me in on this and I will for sure make sure this gets in front of the correct team to look into! 

[flipistics]

@allinthemindtreasures  I think if it was happening to me, I might contact my MLA and MPP about this, as well as maybe the Chamber of Commerce.  The CRA may have difficulty dealing with it on their end, and you definitely will on yours, but those groups/people can get in contact with the right people quickly.

[allinthemindtreasures]

Unfortunetaly this is an eBay error and not a gov't error.  Therefore the MP office cannot help in any way.  The way they positioned it is that this billing authorization form is older then this change with eBay.  eBay is the one that made the error by providing us with the wrong form.  Therfore they have zero jurisdiction on a private company. 

[allinthemindtreasures]

The only people who can help us is eBay.  This is an internal problem.  CRA is right that the form is wrong.  We need eBay to step in and re do all of our forms with the proper one. 

[flipistics]

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@allinthemindtreasures wrote:

Unfortunetaly this is an eBay error and not a gov't error.  Therefore the MP office cannot help in any way.  The way they positioned it is that this billing authorization form is older then this change with eBay.  eBay is the one that made the error by providing us with the wrong form.  Therfore they have zero jurisdiction on a private company. 

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They absolutely can help. They may not have direct jurisdiction, but they definitely have influence due to their ability to create laws to address it. This is actually the type of things they're there to help with. They can get in contact with the right people to get things sorted out fast.

We had to contact our MPP when one of the phone companies were playing stupid games with us (it was a technical mistake on their part) and they strung us along for weeks while ignoring the issue, leaving us with no service for that time. One call to our MLA or MPP (I forget which) got the issue sorted out in hours.

Something like your situation is difficult because you probably can't reach the right people at eBay to deal with this problem yourself (I'm not convinced Devon can either, but he has a much better shot that we do so fingers crossed) and the CRA reps may not have the authority to. It's quite likely whoever eBay is talking to at the CRA is telling them one thing and the person you're dealing with is telling you something different. Someone like a member of parliament has the ability to bridge that gap whereas it could take weeks or months for it to be sorted out otherwise. Just my opinion.

[allinthemindtreasures]

Like I said; They said that this error (due to legislation (law) that is very clear on which form to use) is the error of a private company.  The form is the issue because it is not compliant/legal.  This is not considered a small technical glitch.  This is a legal document. The form that we all signed specifically says is for revenue Quebec only.  We are all wrong.  We have all done wrong.  We need to fix it by having eBay sign the proper form.  I have worked for goverment and I know my MP (not MPP - Member of Parlament.  not sure why you were adding that extra P.)  they cannot help.  Sometimes in life you must admit that you did something wrong, and this is one of those times.  The only way to fix it is to get that form signed properly.  Otherwise they have advised me that they will doing a major audit.  Legally we are all allowing eBay to take money on our behalf for Quebec only.  If it is not, we will owe the taxes that eBay has remited on behalf of us because technically they could only remit the Quebec portion not the Canadian portion.  Legally this is what the government is required to do.  This is 100% an eBay issue that needs to be resolved.  Until then they should not be allowed to collect or remit the tax on our behalf.  I did not talk to an agent at CRA, I am talking to the accountants who audit us.  I am talking to his supervisor.  These are not people who do not konw what they are talking about.  They have the power to make this very difficult for us and due to their legislation (law), we are all being non compliant.  MP's cannot re-write laws that quickly.  Furthermore they are out on summer vacation and will only sit in parlament again on September 18th.  The only way they could put forward a bill to change this law would be to have be part of the Winter 2024 calendar possibly if they felt this was relevan to their cause.  Until they change that law, it would be awesome if eBay could just sign the form.  That would make things way easier then trying to change the laws to allow this form to be used by non Quebec residesnt.  But thank you, I appreciate that you think this would help.  Fact is, It is much more work to change a law then it is to just re do a form.  

[marnotom!]

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@flipistics wrote:

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We had to contact our MPP when one of the phone companies were playing stupid games with us (it was a technical mistake on their part) and they strung us along for weeks while ignoring the issue, leaving us with no service for that time. One call to our MLA or MPP (I forget which) got the issue sorted out in hours.

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You probably mean "MP" rather than "MPP" as an MPP is Ontario's version of an MLA.  An MP would probably be best to contact on this as, like your issue with the phone company, this is something under federal rather than provincial oversight.

I agree that getting another party involved would help as it would bring in another perspective.  Comparing the two versions of the 506 as best as I can, I can see why eBay used the 506 (19) as it has a Quebec enterprise number and identification number, and like the 506 (22) it has a space for their GST/HST account number, so their bases would be covered in the event of a sale to a buyer from Quebec.

Again, I'm no accountant, and I'm certainly not very conversant with the differences between QST and other provincial sales taxes from a business operator's perspective, but I don't think eBay necessarily used the "wrong" form; it might be that they should have used the 506 (22) in addition to the 506 (19).  (Fun, fun.)

Also keep in mind that the 506 was not designed and devised with digital marketplaces in mind.  I agree, @flipistics, that this could be a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.  Somebody in a different CRA department than the team leader may have given eBay the green light to use the 506 (19).

[709_games]

I seem to be in the same boat. Getting calls every day that I owe over 7k in GST/HST but its all been collected and remitted by eBay. Nobody at the CRA knows how to handle the situation. Ive taked to so many people and departments. 

[709_games]

Any update devon@ebay 

[marnotom!]

Are you sure these are legit CRA calls, @709_games? If you weren’t initially sent a letter from CRA about this matter, I’d be suspicious.

[allinthemindtreasures · Accepted solution]

Hello Everyone!  So good news; eBay has signed the proper form for me and finally replied to my request that I sent to the tax email.  So if you are in a similar situation then I am, it is very important that you do not give up on eBay.  They are the ones that made this mistake and yes the only way to be compliant with CRA is to have the proper form filled out and signed.  Do not use the revenue Quebec form.  I believe they are now realising what an issue this is for us sellers and are finally taking it seriously.  Thank you eBay for signing my form!