Ontario Childcare Access and Relief from Expenses tax credit (ON479-A) - How to have both Supporting Person Incomes appear in the calculate the Family Income?

[Sherry E S]

received our NOA, 2020 and 2019. on March 6, 2025---what  mess- over 11,000$

[TurboTaxBrenda]

Please contact me directly in a private chat, and I will be able to assist you further. 

Thank you for choosing TurboTax.

[granpaPaul]

Will intuit / turbo tax reimburse interest and penalty relating to the ON479-A issue?

[TurboTaxBrenda]

Each case will be treated separately and reviewed by the Accuracy Guarantee team, which will then email you with a response/decision on your case; it will come from the email address AccuracyGuarantee.   Please check your email/spam/junk mail to not miss it.  If you haven't heard within 2 weeks, please let us know.

Thank you for choosing TurboTax.

[Shilpy]

@TurboTaxBrenda I sent my documents in mail to Intuit and they received on March 10 however i have not got any email from AccuracyGuarantee. Can you please see if my documents have been received or not?

[TurboTaxBrenda]

I will contact you via private message to get some information. 

Thank you for choosing TurboTax.

[Leslie59]

My daughter got the same thing - a big reassessment and owes $5000 + mega interest.

I have discovered the problem in Turbo Tax.  The amount of childcare expenses posts automatically in to form ON479 once you enter the Receipt via the T-Slip entry screen. BUT - apparently there is another form/schedule 479-A Worksheet that needs to be completed, where the family income is calculated.  Turbo Tax does not prompt to complete this worksheet, and does not give a Warning when reviewing the tax return.  So nobody notices it, as it is an auto-filled form that we don't even know exists.  

This causes the problem that the credit calculates only based on the one income of the spouse claiming the  credit and does not account for the income of the higher income spouse.

You must complete this worksheet ON497-A, Question 3 stating 2 supporting people for all children listed as dependents, AND that one of the supporting people is 'your spouse'.  Then your spouses income will be posted in, added to yours, and the grand total if over $150,000 will completely negate your child care expense credit.

Turbo Tax should either auto-fill this form, or prompt for it to be completed.  This is a negligent error/flaw in the software that is costing people all this money - but legitimately owed money - although interest on it and the expected owing versus really owing being so different is VERY PAINFUL.

[Leslie59]

This was still a problem for 2022 and for 2023.

The problem is that when entering the child care receipt, it posts automatically to Form ON479.  BUT - it does not prompt to complete Schedule ON479-A which is where the question is about the number of supporting parents and whether one is the spouse, which is what is needed to come up with the combined income that ends up negating the credit.

ALSO - THERE IS NO WARNING!  There are warnings for every ridiculous little detail, even that don't apply to us, but NO warning that Schedule ON479-A has not be completed.  You shouldn't even be able to file without that being completed.   So THAT is the FLAW in Turbo Tax that is causing this for all of us.

[gilles751]

You bring a very important point about the warnings when verifying the data entered prior to sending to the CRA. In reading all the messages from people who have encountered this problem with Turbo Tax (Intuit) and the CRA audit, the common thread is because of this Turbo Tax glitch/failure, they all face very high interest penalties plus the returns of the credits which amount to thousands of dollars. Money that they don't have to repay their CRA debt. All these parents did not intentionally mislead the CRA, Turbo Tax did. If you noticed, social media and the mass media (Growing number of TurboTax customers stuck with unexpected high bills after tax audits Global News April 14, 2025 - Ontario families owe thousands in tax debt after Turbo Tax did not flag costly error (Globe and Mail: April 16, 2025) and the list is extensive, so the CRA and Turbo Tax are well aware that this issue is not the parents fault. However, Turbo Tax is refusing to take responsibility and has shifted the blame to their users, their customers, who they says: "they should have used not the basic version, but the guided experience,” where tax filers get insight and tips into potential savings and possible errors" at the extra cost. It is ironic that in 2022, Intuit (Turbo Tax) paid 141 million in restitution in a New York investigation, however, it did not admit any wrongdoing it settling that action. There are multitude examples of where the CRA has reached an agreement with tax software companies to dispense with interest penalties to resolve issues such as this one when the company advocates for its customers/clients. You have all sent packages to Inuit (Turbo Tax) claiming relief from this injustice. How many of you have received an acknowledgement of the receipt of your claim, how many have received a letter confirming that a process has been started on your behalf to address your claim. This list of questions is never ending, but the answers are nowhere to be found. Like many parents, we help our children whenever we can and one of these times is at tax time by helping them fill their income tax returns for the current year. In this ordeal, I have corresponded with him with  Intuit, Toronto office in February and have not received any reply. Neither a reply from the CRA on the reassessment of the NOA. Everyone is in limbo, where do we go from here. I think the way forward to get answers and maybe relief is by exerting social and political pressure on Intuit and the CRA