Specify the employment income you want to claim employment expenses on for working at home due to COVID-19. This can be done by selecting ‘yes’ to transferring employment income to form T777S in the applicable T4 slip.
This above error message kept on coming up on my taxes when I went to file, and it prevented me from filing. The only way I could change it so that I could fix this error message and continue with filing was to answer Yes to this question that was on the bottom of my T4 slip…
Will you claim employment expenses for working at home due to COVID-19 for income on this T4?
Since this was not true for me, I didn’t work from home and I wasn’t trying to claim these expenses which I am not eligible for so would have been completely lying had I said yes to this, I didn’t want to answer this question as Yes. It also increased my return by $200, so definitely would be false reporting which is a path I don’t want to go down.
This was a very frustrating cycle where I was just simply trying to get this benefit for my wife who did work from home due to Covid. The correct answer to the above T4 question should be No and Yes to mine then my wife’s return respectively. But no matter what I changed on the Business Expense page, the only way I could bypass this error and go forward was a Yes Yes answer.
I finally found a fix for it. I went back to the business expense page, checked both my name and my wife’s name here: Incurred expenses for the purpose of earning employment income
(even though it was only her that incurred the expense) then on my page I selected all these 3 options at different times:
Which applies to you? |
| | I received form T2200 - Declaration of Conditions of Employment from my employer and/or I want to claim the Labour Mobility Deduction |
| | | I received form T2200S - Declaration of Conditions of Employment for Working at Home Due to COVID-19 from my employer |
| | | I didn't receive either form from my employer |
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and made sure for the first two Tform options, on the page after, that all boxes were zeroed out. For some stupid reason, even though I originally did not check my name for incurring the expenses, Turbo Tax populated all of the boxes on my page with the same numbers that I put into my wife’s page for the T2200S boxes. After I did this, I could then de-select my name from the first page of the business expense here… Incurred expenses for the purpose of earning employment income
and then when I went to file that stupid error message was finally gone! And the question at the bottom of the T4 slip was No for me and Yes for my wife which is what it should be.
So, for whatever dumb reason, TT was populating my business expense boxes even though I never even stated that I had expenses. If anyone else is having these similar issues and is not simply satisfied with checking Yes to the question at the bottom of the T4s, (which in my case is not at all accurate) then I would suggest going back to your Business Expenses pages and zeroing out all the boxes on both the T2200 and T2200S pages for everyone that you are filing for. TT doesn’t seem to be able to distinguish between filers and will default to filling the boxes for everyone that you are filing for, or at least that is what happened to me.
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